Shatterpoint: Catalyst
by Arcadia Sterling
Summary: For thirty years, superheroes have been gone from the world and everything has changed for the worst. Tension are high and ambition heats the unstable ground upon which Metropolis stands. And yet a sliver of hope for a brighter future rests in the hands of Clark Kent, even if he doesn't know it yet. Change will be catalyzed. An origin story
1. A Shivaree in Black

I would say this has been a long time coming, but no. This versions has only been about three weeks in the making.

Will contain: adults who say "fuck" and do adult things like taxes and grocery shopping, American politics, the American election season, crap-sack America, an unflattering caricature of Trump, i have no idea how to make trump more unflattering than he already is, 21st century racism/sexism/homophobia/fascism, allegories for racism/homophobia presented through metahumans, moderate amounts of violence, police brutality, poorly described imagery of dead bodies, Millennial shenanigans, gay panic, internalized homophobia, A Lesbian Who Lives, LGBTQ characters, race-bending, thinly veiled John Mulaney references

Will NOT contain: Sex, excessive violence, tolerance for racism/sexism/homophobia/fascism, Superman/WonderWoman shipping (there's plenty of it elsewhere, y'aint hurting for content), actually not much shipping at all because I suck at writing romance.

Rated: T for teen, but younger teens should be aware that I'm not very good at sanitizing things and sometimes I forget there are actual teens in my reading audience. There will only be specific chapters were the above warnings will apply and I will make a note of it at the top.

All that said, here we go.

* * *

**Shatterpoint: Catalyst**

Chapter One: A Shivaree in Black

Clark didn't know what had woken him up, except that it must have been loud enough to make his heart try to leap out of his chest. It banged frantically against his ribs as though it was looking for an escape route while he lay there, a hand pressed against his sternum as if the additional pressure would be comforting and reassuring. His nerves thrummed to the same beat, blaring a fairly incandescent warning of danger that had his muscles twitching uselessly. Because there was nothing to run from.

He was in his room. The windows shut, the curtains drawn, and only his house-mates were up and about. They weren't panicking, though. Heart-rates a little faster than normal, but within the typical active range of the average college student. Their voices were low and calm.

Then there came the flat ***bang!bang!*** of gunfire and not as distantly as he would have preferred.

Clark groaned and rolled out of bed, groaning further when he caught sight of the time. It was barely past three and he had gotten into bed at midnight. He could manage, of course, since he could run on far less sleep than the average person and his eight-hour shift had been a little slow today. But it was more the principle of the matter. Three AM was no time to be woken up for rude reasons.

And Metropolis had been _rude_ lately.

But he needed to know what was going on and where it was happening.

Jamming his glasses onto his face, Clark slogged his way up the stairs to the next floor and out onto the house terrace. The transition from the cool air-conditioned interior to the humid night air was unpleasant. None of the terrace lights were on; only the orange streetlights provided any illumination, but those were shadowed by the trees and the houses on either side. If he listened closely enough, he could just pick up the shuffle of movement in the neighboring houses. His house-mates were on the far side of the terrace, low to the paving stones and behind the bulk of the wall. Three or four successive gunshots interrupted the momentary quiet. Clark tilted his head, listening to the barely-there echoes and trying to judge the distance.

Half a mile, give or take?

"Hey, guys." Clark slid into an empty spot beside them and looked out to where they were studying the skyline. The stones were still warm under his knees and his house-mates only twitched a little as he joined them. "How long has this been going on?"

"Almost twenty minutes." said Sven. Brown-haired and Swedish, not much of an accent. He had procured a pack of turkey jerky and now offered a piece to Clark. "Thought it would wake you first. You are always the first one to wake up."

"I must have been tired. Who is it this time?" Clark wondered, trying to peer past the houses across the yard. He turned down the jerky too.

"Los Diabolos." said Heiderich, completely butchering the pronounciation. Blonde-haired and German with a thick accent, just learning _English_ was a task, never mind any other languages. He understood English well enough after three years, but spoken fluency was a work in progress.

"Of course it's them. Which _part_ of them is it, I mean." Clark corrected.

"Can't tell. Half mile off." Heiderich said, quietly stealing a piece of jerky from his Swedish house-mate. He held it like a gun and added: "Bang bang. Is not'ing stand out. Big boys haf pattern. Zis lot, no pattern. Zey shoot und shoot und run und shoot more."

"No bombs this time?"

"Bomben? Nein, nein. Dieses Mal nicht."

The last sentence flew over Clark's head as translations went, but Heiderich's tone was mildly reassuring and Clark could figure it out. No bombs this time. Maybe he'd just been focusing too closely on the gunshots, even in his sleep. He always heard a lot more when he wasn't trying.

"They have not moved far." Sven added, shrugging. "It definitely started near the Cloverleaf Mall, but I think they are only moving _around_ it." he added and a rectangle of dim light _-_\- his phone _-_\- came away from his chest. The Chirp mobile app was running, the visible chirps confirming that the gunfire was coming from near that location.

Clark nodded. The Cloverleaf Mall was just about half a mile away _-_\- he was _definitely_ getting better about his estimates. He knew the area around the mall. It was nothing but commercial; assorted shops and businesses that had closed hours ago. The dueling gangs would have to move almost five or six streets away from the mall before they were close enough to endanger any civilians who were probably not sleeping anymore.

Sven grunted to himself. "I bet it's new ones. New ones keep popping up. Get gunned down like _that_." He snapped his fingers. He caught Heiderich's eye and in stilted German, asked: "Willst du eine Wette machen?"

"Bet not'ing. You loose. Bad luck gamble." Heiderich replied with a smirk.

"Hah. I am Swede. We never lose a bet."

Heiderich leaned towards the proud Swede with a sharper smirk and said: "Want to make bet?"

Clark couldn't hear any sirens.

No, the police weren't going to show up at this one either.

The gangs weren't near the residential blocks yet, but that was the keyword. Yet. Just because they were by the Cloverfield Mall didn't mean they wouldn't start moving outwards, one gang searching for better cover or retreating and hoping to lose their pursuers in the maze of townhouses and yards. It would only take one bullet to go astray.

"Well, that doesn't sound like it's going to come anywhere near us. I'm going back to bed." Clark said decisively, getting onto his feet but not standing up.

"You haf class?" Heiderich asked.

"Yeah, at eight o'clock."

"In the morning? Ack! You poor bastard, why?" Sven wondered, looking physically pained.

"It's not my fault. The professor only had that one slot. I _need_ to take this class. It's required for my major." Clark said, a tad defensively. He knew eight AM classes were brutal. For _other_ people. He wasn't _other_ people. Still, the fact that the professor was forcing _everyone else_ into the eight AM class was really a dick move.

"Ouch." Heiderich said, then pointed at the terrace door with a stern expression. "Bed. Now. Sleep." His stern expression was almost more exasperated than serious, like he was used to arguing with younger siblings over the merits of a regular bedtime and was anticipating resistance. Because he added: "I vill machen kaffee und wurst for you in morgen." As if that would sweeten the concept.

"Coffee and sausage?" Clark guessed, hoping that he was translating that right. He had started brushing up on basic German as soon as he'd realized that his house-mate's fluency was still pretty shaky, but he had only started two weeks ago.

"You don't make _me_ breakfast." Sven complained good-naturedly. "I share my turkey jerky and I don't get authentic German breakfast?"

"You no haf eight clock class in morgen." Heiderich said, smiling. He helped himself to another piece of jerky. "You are fly zat vhines for fun. Mein leetle bruder vhines for sport. He machen Olympic efent out of yelling und vin gold medal. I am immune to vhiny flies."

Sven didn't respond for a moment, because he had to convert that into non-accented English and then run it against his mental translation dictionary to make sure the English and Swedish were matching up. There was always that second or two of buffering time.

"I think he insulted me." he informed Clark in a hiss.

"Sounded a bit like one." Clark agreed.

He patted Sven on the shoulder in consolation and then sort of crouched-walked back across the terrace to the door. The chances of a bullet striking from half a mile away was slim to nil, but the gunshots just _sounded_ like they were only a few blocks down. He slipped back through the door and latched it. The insulation of the house and the hum of the assorted appliances muted the sound of the gunshots a little, but not enough to his ears. They were thunderously loud, simultaneously echoing and not.

_Half a mile away..._ Clark looked back over his shoulder, through the door window. _There's... ooh, I dunno, a dozen or so each?_ He couldn't pick out individual footsteps at this distance, not with half a mile of city between here and there. But the gangs were yelling at each other in between shots and that was enough to get a rough estimate. _That's not too many. Not too far away either. I can be there and back without anyone thinking I was anywhere other than bed._

Clark hurried down the stairs and if he barely skimmed each of the steps along the way, his house-mates weren't around to notice. With the bedroom door shut safely behind him, he stripped out of his pajama pants and hurled them towards the direction of the bed and made his way over to the closet. He didn't know who the previous occupant of the room might have been, but they had left behind a fair amount of black gothy make-up and some clothes of the black and-or leathery persuasion.

Well, the pants were probably pleather because they slipped on a lot easier than actual leather pants would have. He had been sure to wash them thoroughly several times, but there was no getting rid of the weird fuzzy texture on the inside. A nylon-ish trench coat that was at least part raincoat with a hood to match and big ol' army surplus boots that had also been left behind. They were a bit tight around the ankles but it wasn't like he was planning to go dancing in them. The last bit of clothing Clark slipped over his head was an old ski mask. It was threadbare and fraying along the edges and it wouldn't do the job of keeping his face warm anymore, but that wasn't its job anymore.

If there was one thing that comics had taught him, it was that you didn't let them see your face.

Fingerprints too; those were another big no-no.

He had a cheap pair of gloves for that.

He was fully dressed in a span of two minutes (without ripping anything this time yay!), shrouded head to toe in black (shiny) clothes, any visible skin smeared with some of that black gothy make-up, only the bright electric blue of his eyes.

Without the glasses, his eyes just Did That.

He probably looked terrifying from the outside.

There was an elm tree growing over the sidewalk with a fair-sized crown that blocked the view from the other side of the street, but Clark still hoped that the neighbors over there habitually kept their curtains drawn. The last thing he needed was for a well-meaning neighbor see him climbing out the window and then calling the cops on a possible home invader.

And he _definitely_ didn't need them to see that he didn't so much as _fall_ to the ground as he _floated_, touching down on the pavement lightly as a feather and just as soundlessly.

Clark didn't linger, of course. He bolted up the street almost as soon as his weight had settled, sprinting too fast for the human eye to get a bead on. He swung around the next corner, to the north and towards the pop-bang of gunfire.

_Someone_ had to stop the gang fighting. Someone had to try and keep even just a small part of this city a little safer.

Los Diabolos _had_ been the largest gang in Metropolis. The largest and the oldest and the most organized. The most cohesive, the most loyal to their brothers. Right up until this past winter. Something had happened to drive a deep rift into the gang leadership and they had fallen into a civil war. No one knew for sure why; that was gang business. Only the streets really _knew_.

But the timing of this little civil war had coincided rather neatly with the sudden deaths of several former members. Murdered execution-style, tied at the wrists and ankles in the water off a Slums pier, the bodies found strapped into life-jackets and tethered to the pilings. The deed had been traced back to a former LexCorp associate whose employ in the company had been terminated a month prior. Another instance that coincided with LexCorp's acquisition of another small manufacturing company.

Clark wasn't sure how the events were related_-_\- or if they were related _at all_. It was possible to draw lines from one thing to another. But the streets had seen a connection that no one else had and Los Diabolos had woken up screaming, aiming the full force of its rage at itself, clawing and tearing at its own leadership and structure until the cracks deepened and the faction lines were drawn.

When the dust had begun to clear on the eve of spring, three splinter groups had broken away. Los Diablos Rojos, but the media referred to them as "The Red Devils" to better differentiate them from the bulk of the remaining Diabolos gang. They had swept clean a southern portion of the Newton district, muscling out or taking over the smaller crews.

The Italian-led Demoni di Giada had claimed a few acres of Pelham and were defending their new territory with aplomb, content for the moment to keep their heads down and consolidate their power. At the least, they hadn't made the six o'clock news.

Last, the small but vicious Na Diabhal. The Irish Devils, who had retreated as far away as Highville before they had dug themselves in. Mostly Irish, at least. There was a mix of ethnicities and languages and fiery tempers that kept them venturing out to get piss-drunk and take a swing at rival crews for the fun of it.

But it was none of them tonight, Clark saw, as he came across the first gang members in the shadow of the Cloverleaf Mall. The original Diabolos had custom graphic t-shirts with a devil-silhouette emblazoned across a wall of flames and other sorts of similarly themed swag. Los Diabolos Rojos had been forced to abandon the swag, so they had adopted any kind of red head-wear, from bandannas to those horrible MAGA hats, usually with devil horns sewn on just so they weren't mistaken for any other gang. The bulk of Na Diabhal liked to affect that over-the-top Irish accent that was probably an offensive stereotype and were usually very drunk by the time they stepped out to cause trouble.

This group of three or four, watching the street from behind a parked car, was just wearing ripped jeans and mismatched shirts in varying states of disrepair. The other gangs had come to expect him now, after a few weeks. But when Clark swooped in _-_\- little more than a black smearing silhouette with unearthly glowing eyes _-_\- all they did was freeze up in terror.

It wouldn't last. Clark moved quickly through, seizing the guns (high-caliber semi-automatics how were these getting onto the streets?!) and crushing them in his fists as easily as he would crumple paper. That done, he moved on, following the road up around the perimeter of the mall. The second group he encountered _-_\- a trio trying to sneak through the hedges at the parking lot entrance _-_\- were no more distinguishable than the first group, except that they carried some heavy-duty assault rifles instead.

_**Those**__ should definitely not be on the street._ Clark thought fiercely.

He crashed into the hedges without ceremony, the nylon shrieking through the almost rubbery leaves. The noise flushed out the trio of gang-bangers and they leapt from the shrubbery, already screaming and blasting rounds in his general direction. Clark dodged out of the way of the badly-aimed bullets, dropping to the ground and surging forward back upright so fast that it felt like his spine was flexing.

Without any real protection, the rifles noises this close were like someone punching his eardrums directly. Clark grimaced, fighting the urge to cover his ears, and closed in on the near gangster, a underfed-looking fellow with about eight hairs to make up a mustache and a paper-white face. Skimpy Mustache screeched something in Spanish and tried to swing the assault rifle around, but Clark pounced on the fellow and bulldozed him right back into the shrubbery. Skimpy Mustache crumpled under his not-inconsiderable weight, though Clark was careful not to land directly on top of the scrawny gangster. He slammed the rifle into the ground, hearing the casing crack, and the muzzle bent.

Instantly, there was a ringing silence as the rapid-fire **bangbangbangbang** stopped. The shrubbery rustled as Skimpy Mustache's two companions scanned the hedge-grow. They had the rifles pointed down into the hedges, but without being able to see where their comrade was, they didn't dare squeeze the triggers.

Pinned between Clark's knees, Skimpy Mustache didn't so much as whimper. The blood gone from his face and his heart a frantic drum-beat under his ribs, he stared up at the black figure, the indeterminable man-shaped punctuated by a terrifying electric-blue glow. Slowly and silently and exaggerating the gesture, Clark raised a finger to his lips.

Skimpy Mustache started to shake.

Clark studied the other two. They were almost as scrawny and underfed-looking, maybe younger than him. One wore a flannel overshirt and the second had a well-worn Monarch's baseball cap on backwards. They were sweating profusely, hearts pounding, their breathing harsh and fearful.

"Lo hizo... Son ellos...?" Flannel whispered, the first to break the silence. He was trembling, sending a ripple through the leaves.

"A dónde fueron?" Baseball Cap moaned. His palms were so sweaty that Clark could hear it, the slick kind of gross squishy interaction between the skin and the rifle grip. "Lo tomó lo tomó lo llevó al infierno-"

"Cállate, no, no lo hizo! Solo está en los arbustos." Flannel said, freeing one hand long enough to smack his fellow in the back of the neck.

"Él está muerto! Lo consiguió! Ander está muerto!" Baseball Cap wailed. "Nos llevará a continuación_-_-! No, no voy a dejar que me lleve!"

He threw the rifle down and started fighting his way through the thick branches that didn't let him pass easily, almost crying in fear. Flannel yelled something insulting after him, turning his attention away from the shrubbry, and Clark chose that moment to surface dramatically. Flannel whipped back around at the noise and a bullet went ***BANG!*** inches past Clark's head, the burst of its passage rustling the nylon hood. He grabbed the muzzle almost reflexively, crushing it beyond the hope of repair.

_Ouch hot hot hot hot!_

Flannel went "eep!". Clark waggled an admonishing finger.

Then, making sure that he had Flannel's full attention, he picked up the discarded rifle and got a good grip on it, then twisted both ends in opposite directions. The casing split like a frozen melon rind, cracking and splintering in crazy lines. It didn't take much effort; actually about as much as he would put into splitting open a frozen melon rind. With a great cracking noise, the rifle peeled apart along the center points and he dropped the two halves into the bushes.

Flannel decided that cowardice was the better part of valor and dove through the top layer of branches out of sight.

Clark allowed him a little smirk. He turned and leapt out of the bushes, ten feet into the air and ten feet forward, landing as lightly as before. Then he was off and running again, past Baseball Cap who screamed and fell over in fright.

It was a little hard not to smile. Maybe scaring the piss out of the gangbangers wasn't the best way to go, but if it made them significantly more enthused for a quiet night in, then the neighborhood was a wee bit safer the next night. That _was_ kind of why he was out here.

At the next corner, he turned right up the wider avenue, following the sound of an angry buzz of voices from around the far side. The mall's owners were adding a new wing on the eastern-most side, but it had spent the last year under construction and currently remained a hollow, gutted-looking shell of a building. The frame-work was exposed and the once protective tarp-like wraps had become tattered and had acquired a tendency to stir ominously in any breezes.

There were _a lot_ of voices issuing from inside the unfinished wing. Clark slowed his sprint until he came to a halt at the line of pallets laden with unused material and crept around to the edges. A light was on inside, throwing tall shadows against the sides. He squinted until the tarps and the half-finished walls seemed to fall away and he could clearly see everyone inside.

It was the other two dozen or so of the gang-members. Half of them were clustered on one side and the other half on the other. Their apparent leaders had taken just a few steps forward to yell at each other across the middle. No signature regalia or thematically similar clothing, so most likely a pair of splinter groups having it out. Those must have been the perimeter guards back there, making sure no other gang interrupted this tête-à-tête.

_Do I count? I mean, I'm not a rival gang or anything..._

All of the gangsters were well-armed, handling semi-automatics with ease, bowie knives and other pointy stabby objects stashed about their persons. A few had appropriated some of the discarded construction equipment, like claw hammers and pry-bars and even a plank of wood with a lot of nails stuck through it. The two groups glared at each other and made intimidating gestures while leaders argued loudly. Clark had taken a Spanish class in high school, but the words were coming too rapidly for him to really follow what they were saying. It did sound like the two leaders were trying to convince the other to leave without it coming to blows.

He appreciated that they were making attempts at civility, but that was an awful lot of guns they had there.

Like, way too many.

Where were they all coming from?

Now, while they were distracted.

Clark charged through the tarp and through a gap in the partially-finished was nothing sneaky or graceful about his entrance. The tarp crackled and tore, while his elbow clipped the edge of the stucco, sending cracks out almost ten feet and taking out a chunk twice the size of his fist. Someone yelled and the gangsters scattered instantly. The light winked out.

Among the various things that his eyes could do, adjusting quickly to abrupt changes in light was actually not one of them. For a moment, Clark was just as blinded as the others; the construction zone reduced to dim shapes and fuzzy edges. But the scurrying footsteps and harsh breathing gave him an idea as to where the nearest person was-

***cra-whack!***

Pain like _holy shit_ jarred up Clark's leg from the knee, all the way down to the bone. Something equally solid and unforgiving tangled up between his knee and his ankle, knocking him off balance and he skidded into the concrete flooring.

"Lo tengo! Lo tengo!" a gangster screamed triumphantly and the other gang-members cheered uproariously in response. All of the footsteps changed directions, coming right back at him.

Oh. Oh, they had set a trap for him, how clever!

Clark didn't have the time to appreciate that. He scrambled back to his feet, grappling for whatever was wrapped around his leg - a pry-bar practically embedded around the contours of his knee. He yanked it off and threw it aside, sending a fresh throb of pain rocketing up his leg. Still half-blinded by the darkness, he simply barreled for the opposite wall and crashed through the I-beams and stucco. The adrenaline shoved the pain aside and he sped away into the night, leaving the gang to shout insults.

Clark didn't make it very far. He got around the corners to another wing of the mall and well out of sight before his clobbered leg demanded that he _stop running_. He staggered to a halt and found a wall to lean against, taking all the weight off the knee in question.

They had set a trap for him!

He giggled a little, though he couldn't tell if he was genuinely impressed or amazed that he had blundered right into it.

Nonetheless, it had been well set up. Los Diabolos _had_ come to expect him whenever they decided to take down some small rival crew, so actually _setting_ the trap was simple. Some gunfire, no signature regalia, and a few rookies on the perimeter to sell the image of a splinter gang. And he had walked right into it like a sucker, well done!

Two dozen of them actually stood a chance at overpowering him, since they probably had guessed by now that he actively tried not to hurt anyone. He could throw a punch, yes, but he could also reduce someone's head to chunky salsa on accident.

He was already toeing the edge of vigilantism here.

Clark probed his knee gingerly. It stung and throbbed, but the pain was neither blinding nor debilitating. Maybe there was a bruise there, though it wouldn't last. He healed fast. His knee would be in tip-top shape by noon tomorrow.

"Jeez, I can get run over by a combine and barely flinch, but a pry-bar to the knee..." he muttered. "'S'always the little things that getcha, ain't it."

Ah, win some, lose some.

He'd try and be a little faster the next time.

_Wait._

Clark tilted his head to listen better and closed his eyes. His right ear was still ringing a little from the earlier gunshot and his left ear was generally frazzled, so it took a moment for him to isolate that ululating wail from the tinnitus. It sounded like... sirens?

The police.

Of course. _Now_ they showed up.

Clark heaved himself off the wall. His knee complained as he put weight back onto it, but he ignored the pain and set off at a light sprint. Two police cars, a few blocks out and closing at reckless speeds down the north-bound streets. He just needed to outrun them further south or detour east a few blocks before_-_-

_look out_

***Screeeeee-**-**!*** went a third police car, rocketing around from a blind corner not twenty feet from where Clark was crossing the grass median. Too many trees and bushes, too focused on the other two cars back north that he had heard this one_-_-

Wait, that sound, was that a_-_-

_-_-rifle shell chambering in_-_-

_-_-the passenger halfway out the window and _wow_ that was some serious heavy hardware the cop was packing right there_-_-

Clark saw the muzzle-flash, saw the shell ejected, saw the bullet and its trajectory and that was where his head was _about_ to be in two more steps and perhaps it was the serendipity of the universe that his knee screeched a protest and buckled. Gravity and the tension along either side of his spine hurled him into the muddy drainage ditch. The bullet whooshed past, six feet above his prostrate form. Glass cracked.

The reverie ended.

Time rushed back into Clark's perception, like he had gotten ahead of it and now it was catching up. Somewhere behind and above him, the third police Charger was wheeling around, the tires screeching and the cop with the _what the fuck kind of rifle was that_ was shouting at raging volume. Another thunderous ***bang*** cracked through the already very disturbed night and a bullet thunked into the mud just as Clark rolled aside out of its path.

_They're shooting at me!_

_Why are they shooting at me?!_

He had never bothered the cops!

Sure they were useless and deliberately slow to respond, but he very much made a point to stay out of their way!

The mud made it momentarily difficult for him to get his footing, but Clark scrambled out of the shallow ditch before the driver could throw the Charger into reverse. The angry cop with the big gun slapped the car's roof's repeatedly, as though that would speed things up.

Half of his right leg strenuously objected to this whole running away business, but Clark mentally shushed it and proceeded to bail across the street. On the other side of the boulevard were some more high-end boutiques and specialty shops that were too posh for the plebeian consumers of a shopping mall. The fashionable retail park went too far in both directions. He wasn't going to get out of sight down the side-streets before the Angry Cop had Clark in his sight-lines.

Clark had never been shot before. He wasn't about to break that admirable streak.

He heard another bullet whistling up behind him and promptly dodged to the side, sprinting parallel to the sidewalk and away from the Angry Cop. The rooftops of the retail park were just twenty feet off the ground, the lowest along this stretch of the boulevard. If he was going to do it-_-_

_You can do it! C'mon, c'mon! It's just twenty feet! _

It had to be now.

Left foot up on the curb, muscles taut and bunched _think springs Clark!_ and jumped_-_-!

For a split-second, there was a wondrous sense of weightlessness and Clark felt as though if he just _pushed_ a little harder- _Wall_! His body slapped into it, fingers coming just a bare inch short of the rooftop lip, the army-surplus boots scrabbling for purchase against the stucco.

But he didn't fall. Maybe one boot found a place to dig in. Maybe whatever ability helped him to float down also helped him to float _up_. Regardless, he got his hands over the edge and all but flung himself safely onto the rooftop.

The Angry Cop spat an angry curse.

"Language." Clark whispered, grinning, flush with relief and adrenaline and a sense of giddiness.

A third bullet went ***ka-pwing!***, nicking the edge of the rooftop on its way up, but otherwise it came nowhere near him. He was out of sight and the angles were all wrong. The Angry Cop yelled incoherently in frustration. It was probably time to call this one done anyways. So Clark rolled over onto his knees and elbows and crawled away some distance until he was sure that he could stand up without being noticed. He might have to detour to one direction or the other for a few blocks, just in case Angry Cop wasn't ready to give up yet.

He listened to the police Charger turning around, to the tune of Los Diabolos gang-members scattering in every direction like roaches exposed to light and the newly arrived cops struggling to corral them. For a second _-_\- just one hot second of insanity _-_\- he felt bizarrely obligated to go back and lend a hand in the name of taking a few more guns off the streets, but no. No no _no_. Going back there and showing up in front of Angry Cop and his rifle of too-large proportions?

Absolutely not.

Besides, he _really did_ have an eight o'clock class and even he needed more than three hours of sleep.

-0-

back in the saddle baby oh yeah


	2. The Campus Cryptid

Will this be semi-consistent update pattern, you ask? No, no, not really.

I was hoping to have written up to chapter 10 by now, but chapters 6 and 7 fought me, and 7 still needs some work. I'm going to put this story on the backburner for at least the month of October and let it stew for a bit, see what comes up.

* * *

Chapter Two: The Campus Cryptid

Metropolis was a city of clean straight lines, shining skyscrapers of steel and glass, and of innovation and forward-thinking. Robust, lively, and always pushing into the next tomorrow like there was no yesterday, the Midwestern city was unparalleled in many ways. It had a place on the very short list of so-called "super cities".

Metropolis was awe-inspiring, no doubt about that. If one was talking about great monuments of civilization and the forward charge of progress, then it was Metropolis that had begun to stand out in recent decades. It had always been a first-class destination, but Midwest America tended to fall short of the glamour of the coasts. But people had started taking notice of that fact that the Big Apricot was easily among the greatest, grandest cities in the contiguous United States. Its sweeping modern styles, shimmering steel, plate-glass windows, and sleek design all seemed to draw the eye in. It made no effort to hide its grandeur, instead flaunting it loud and proud. There was no other city in the world that quite matched Metropolis.

New York City always had words to say about that. All in good spirit, though. The Big Apple and the Big Apricot got along with a very friendly rivalry, poking at each other through amiable social media wars and a jesting middle finger every now and again. They vied for titles all the same, each seeking to maintain a position over the other as _the_ queen city. Empire State versus Lady of the Lakes.

(Although some people presumed that if Gotham ever found a large enough pressure hose to blast away the grime, the south Jersey city could really give Metropolis _and_ New York City a run for their money. They whispered this, as if they didn't want the Big Mucky to get any ideas.)

Unfortunately, though, quite a bit like Gotham, Metropolis was falling apart.

But Gotham had been falling apart since its founding. A grungy disaster city prone to chaos and rioting and record-high crime-rates accompanied by a general sense of corporeal displacement. It was used to this. Gotham fell apart like clothing models sauntered down a catwalk.

Metropolis was not used to coming unstitched at the seams.

And unlike Gotham, it was doing its very best to hold things together.

Clark preferred to be optimistic even at the worst of times, but even he could tell that Metropolis wasn't doing the most stand-up job at keeping itself together. It wasn't the fault of the people, by and large. Its citizenry was renowned for strong moral integrity. But even Their Best wasn't enough when it came to the absolute crap that was leaking out of the city government offices. Metropolis was falling apart because some really scummy folks had won the crucial elections and then had decided it would be a Really Swell Idea to reshape the city into something a little more like its dear disaster sister in New Jersey.

The good news (if you wanted to call it that) was that Metropolis really only showed its cracking facade after dark. By daylight, Metropolis looked like everything you would expect it to be. Everyone was usually pretty quick about spackling over the bullet holes and replacing their cracked windows and cleaning up the debris when a gang threw down the night before. With the sun rising bright out of the east and a clear blue sky in the works, the lush campus of Metropolis University looked like the promise of the American Dream on its way to be fulfilled.

It was still very early in the school year. There was still time for optimism.

At a quarter to eight in the morning, only a few students looked bright-eyed and bushy-tailed while the rest reluctantly shuffled around in their pajamas on a search for coffee and other forms of sustenance, squinting against the sun's glare. Despite his three AM adventure, Clark felt... Maybe bushy-tailed? Yeah, he felt a little perky. But that may have been because Heiderich's idea of proper German coffee included whipped cream and an overly generous splash of _kirschwasser_, a cherry-flavored eighty proof brandy (also two _weisswurst_ and an absolute unit of a pretzel).

So Clark was feeling _pretty good_ right now.

It was a buzzy placebo feeling, no doubt, since the alcohol had probably lasted all of five minutes against his metabolic rate. He hadn't tested his alcohol tolerance extensively, but it was going to take more than a few splashes of brandy diluted by coffee to get him up to Underwear Karaoke levels of Hammered Out Of His Gourd. But as long as the placebo effect was there, he was going to enjoy it.

Because the rest of this year was going to _suuuuck_.

He was in his last year of Metropolis U's three-year journalism program. His final three classes were Feature Writing (important), Editing (very important), and the Culture of Social Media (which was going to be interesting since it was taught by the Weed Professor). It was a light course-load, but by all accounts, it was going to be rather work-intensive.

The paths emptied of foot traffic as Clark pedaled away from the dorm buildings and assorted campus eateries. He only had to ring the bike bell once or twice. His destination was the Bala Rubio Hall in the southwestern corner of the admittedly extensive campus. As architecture went, it was uninspired. It was shaped exactly like a brick turned on its narrow side. Purportedly a donation of the benevolent Luthor family who had refused to take any credit for it after reviewing the finalized design.

There was a much nicer fountain with a Luthor name-plaque attached, all graceful swooping lines that better fit their preferred aesthetic. The corner in which the Bala Rubio Hall was located was the absolute edge of the campus, sharing its little fountain square with the Merton Building. Here the foot-paths spilled into a small shopping plaza and then proper streets leading to student-housing. Clark hadn't been able to find off-campus housing down in this corner, which was why he was bunking with a pair of engineering students twenty-five minutes to the north-east.

There were bike racks under a dedicated shelter by the side of the Merton Building. Bicycle theft had never been an issue for as long as Clark had been attending classes, but still locked his bike to the racks because it was a very nice bike and also vital to his job, so he _definitely_ couldn't lose it.

The interior of the Bala Rubio Hall was just as aesthetically inspired as its exterior. Bright murals and other artwork had been slathered along the plain white halls in an effort to liven things up, but it the success thereof was hit or miss. Clark double-checked the location of the Feature Writing classroom and then started up the stairs. Third floor, room B, Professor Carter residing. A perfect square of a room, uncomfortably small windows, and a generic floral air freshener smell.

Clark sneezed immediately. The scent was probably light and tolerable to everyone else, but he might as well have been smacked in the nostrils by a heady bouquet of lilacs. He took a seat at one of the rear tables, closest to the windows, and cracked open the nearest one, hoping to dilute the lilacky smell. By the time cool weather rolled in, he would be accustomed to the air freshener, but right now it was just unpleasant.

At five 'til eight, there was a stampede through the classroom doors. Clark recognized many of his classmates from the previous year hastening to claim their preferred seats. Some were dressed to the nines, hoping that a snappy wardrobe or a full face of make-up would help the professor to view them more favorably. Others had barely changed out of their pajamas. The journalism classes were never very big. This one had started off at a little above sixty, but various reasons had whittled the number down around to around forty. All the same, there still managed to be a few people he had never actually seen before.

Professor Carter strolled in right on time. Dark-colored eyes, tanning bed skin, and stylishly cut hair an earthy brown color. Early to mid-thirties, or thereabouts. He had a strange little floof of a goatee and tinted designer glasses. He looked at the forty-some students sprawled in the chairs and made a soft "tuh" noise.

"Good morning, everyone." he said, not looking directly at any of them. He waited for the mumble to pass. "Welcome to Feature Writing. If you haven't figured what this class is for, then you probably shouldn't be here. This where you'll learn how to write real fake newspaper articles that mignt not make a seasoned editor cry."

Professor Carter had a dry bland voice with a touch of a nasally undertone. That was not a good combination for an eight AM class on a Monday.

"People call Metropolis the birthplace of the American newspaper." the professor went on, now beginning to pace back and forth across the front. "That's not true. It was actually Boston. April twenty-fourth, seventeen-oh-four. Metropolis didn't get the same idea until seventy-one years later. But it doesn't matter. What matters to folks is that Metropolis has a reputation as one of the hottest news-media sites in the Midwest. And that's a reputation you kids are now expected to live up to.

"_If_ you make it through my class alive.

"No one will pass this class with a perfect score. In eight years, no one has _ever_ passed my class with a perfect score. There is no such thing as a perfect score between these walls."

He sounded proud.

_So you suck at teaching. That's nothing to boast about._ Clark thought sourly.

"I do not have confidence in any single one of you. All of you are the worst I will ever see." Professor Carter said, waving an admonishing finger. "In this classroom, I will _break_ you. I will tear you apart. Your every idea, your every thought, your every silly notion and delusion. Conclusions, opinions, theories. I will _shred_ them. There is no room for your _you_ in this classroom. Whoever you are in the day to day, you are not that person in my classroom. That person stays out. Here you are a gross soggy little lump of clay and it is my unfortunate duty to shape you into the kind of journalist that can play on the field of competition here in Metropolis. You do what I tell you to do, you learn what I tell you to learn. No more, no less."

He looked over the assembly with a callously smug expression, as though he was waiting for someone to start crying. Clark got a sense of vague dread. There was no doubt. This was the asshole professor. The one who took pride in belittling his students and calling it teaching. And he got away with it because there wasn't any other Feature Writing class.

Yes. The rest of this year was going to suck.

No one cried (just bewildered and slightly hostile), but Professor Carter was pleased by their silence.

"Now that we understand each other, let's begin." he said with a smugly ugly smile. "I think you're all old enough to understand the ground rules of classroom etiquette, so we'll be skipping past those. We will also not be covering a syllabus because you're all adults here and I think you're past the stage of needing your hands held.

"I will run this class exactly like a newspaper. I will not assign stories. You will go out there and find a story. You will write it. You will peer-edit. Then you will bring the drafts to me for approval and then you will re-write them as many times as it takes to get my stamp. Your grade will be determined by the quality of your work. I reserve the right to veto any of your ideas at any time. Like I stated earlier, all of your ideas are horrible. I have no faith in you. That you'll have to earn.

"Normally, I would have you all working by yourselves for an authentic experience. But, in light of the recent issues, I and the board feel that you will be safer if you roam the city in groups." Professor Carter explained. He managed to look displeased about this, as though he'd really be counting on releasing them unsupervised into sketchier parts of the city. "Nothing changes about the way this classroom will function. But now you have trusted circle of associates to peer-edit and receive feedback from. You'll learn that there is value in team-work. I hear that's a lesson some of you still haven't learned."

As he said this, his eyes narrowed on a section of the classroom opposite of where Clark was sitting, and his face split into an innocent yet incredibly mocking smile. Clark didn't recognize any of the half-dozen students over in that corner, but whoever was being called out, they probably didn't deserve it.

Professor Carter maintained the innocent-yet-smug expression for another moment before he finally turned back to the classroom at large. "Teamwork, my soggy little lumps of clay. With luck, you'll grow positively from it." he said, his voice too sharp for sincerity. "Now this may come as a shock, but there's no such thing as a well-balanced team. That's a pretty piece of fiction everyone tries to sell you. _Real_ teams are never balanced. _Real_ teams will keep you looking over your shoulder. It's the strife and difficulty in getting along that makes you grow as people."

Clark blinked. _That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. That's the worst thing I've ever heard. What kind of negative life experience did you have to make you think that? And why are you trying to foist that mind-set off on us? Those are the worst kind of teams!_

"Unfortunately, I don't know all of you well enough to make a selection based off of personality, so instead I organized it by grade point average." Professor Carter announced, making a show of taking his phone out of his pocket. "It doesn't matter to me if you don't get along. You're not supposed to like your team-mates."

_Who hurt you?_

"As soon as I'm done with the list, huddle up and get acquainted. You've got work to do. I expect a first draft by next Monday." the professor added.

He cleared his throat and began reading the names off his list, seeming completely unaware of the vibes he had sent out into the classroom. Much of the bewilderment had faded, replaced more fully with hostility and spite now that everyone realized this guy was an asshole.

Why was this the only class? Why was this the only teacher?

Why was it at eight o'clock in the morning?

_Maybe I should have just let Los Diabolos beat me up last night._ Clark thought, a bit despairingly. Nursing half a hundred bruises right now would have been better than watching this professor's weird schadenfreude at the thought of them failing this class_-_-

"_-_-Clark Kent, and_-_-"

_My name?_

Clark's head snapped up. "Here!" he called out like a punctual schoolboy, automatically, before he remembered the professor was not taking attendance.

Half the class giggled.

"Everyone can see that, Mr. Kent. Thank you for a prompt response." Professor Carter stated flatly. "Since you were obviously not paying attention, your team consists of Boone Williams, Victoria Vendelin, Kassidy Knight, Eric Ridgeway, and Lois Lane." He smiled, a gross smug thing that didn't belong on his face. "Good luck, you pieces of play-doh."

Well, wasn't that just rude.

_Lois Lane, Lois Lane, where have I heard that name before?_ Clark wondered, an instant before all the stories and rumors, confirmed and apocryphal, rushed to mind.

Oh no.

_Oh hell no._

_I should be asking where __**haven't**__ I heard that name before._

As the class began getting up and moving to assemble into their teams, Clark looked around the students he was supposed to team up with. The professor had managed to stick him on a team with five people he had never actually met and didn't know by sight. He knew Lois Lane by word of mouth because who didn't anymore, but no one had ever reliably pointed her out before.

But then a few broke loose of the shuffling morass and came towards him, claiming the abandoned chairs nearby and parking themselves at Clark's table Two other young men, one a tall thuggishly-looking thug of a person and the other overall kind of elegant and shiny. And three young woman; one fashionable-looking and slathered in unnecessary amounts of make-up, the second not making eye contact, and the third with a plainly irritated expression as she threw herself into the empty chair right beside Clark. The others seemed to cluster on the other side of the table _away_ from her.

The new team spent a long silent moment regarding each other, not sure where to begin. Then thuggish thug clapped his hands.

"Well, I guess we in'erduce ourselves." he said. "Cuz I never met a single one of the rest of you before. I'll go first." He cleared his throat. "I'm Boone. But y'all can call me 'Boomer'."

Boone definitely looked like the kind of guy who would grow up to call himself 'Boomer'. He looked like the kind of guy who'd crash a Superbowl party, shotguns beers, and crush the cans with his forehead. Tall and muscly with thews as thick as the width of Clark's skull and reddish-colored hair that was sheared to a buzz-cut. Probably got up at five AM just to hit the gym and make vegetable smoothies and _yikes_ that was a lot of body spray coming off his underarms. He even had that deep baritone Bro voice.

"Probably gonna be like a sports reporter or something. Y'know, something cool." Boomer added importantly.

The guy next to him pointed to himself. "Me next? So I'm Eric. But you can call me 'your man'." he said suavely, winking at the ladies. Black hair, messy and stylish, flawless skin, brown eyes. Not unattractive, certainly, but sort of like a nineties pretty boy. He ruffled his hair to make it look windblown. "Dunno what kind of journalist I'm gonna be. Figured I'd graduate first."

The first of the ladies cleared her throat. "Call me Vicki." she said right away. Dark blue eyes and artificially red hair curled heavily and piled in a stylish updo. "Beauty, fashion, make-up, celebrity gossip. You name it and I'll be the top columnist in the field."

Clark usually tried not to to make judgments based on first impressions, but he would have been surprised if someone with a full face of very _flamboyant_ bright make-up and clothes plucked right from a designer catalogue expressed an interest in something other than a facet of the beauty industry. Vicki Vendelin looked like every beauty guru that Tripod had tried to recommend to him. Everything from the foundation layer to the very tips of her voluminous eyelashes. He didn't think he was supposed to be able to _smell_ the waxy scent of the cosmetics. There was half a can of hairspray holding her curls together.

On the contrary, Kassidy couldn't have been more the opposite. She introduced herself in a very quiet voice and made so little eye contact that Clark could hardly tell what color her eyes were. Brown shoulder-length hair with a badly-done red ombre and a generally squirrely demeanor.

"I don't know what field of journalism I want to specialize in." she admitted, playing with her fingers.

"Cool, join the club." Eric said, reaching across Vicki to solicit a fist-bump from the other woman. She stared at the fist for a moment before hesitantly tapping her knuckles to his. Eric looked very pleased with himself.

_So if they aren't Lois Lane, that means..._ Clark tried to be discreet about glancing to his side, where the third lady sat.

Ah, yes. There was the dread.

Lois had angled herself away from the table in general, arms crossed, her expression still scowling and irritable. Dark eyes and glossy black hair done up in a bun with a few loose strands around her face. Comparatively tame make-up application. Definitely some Asian heritage in those features, but Clark would have been hard-pressed to guess correctly the country or ethnic region.

"Do I _have_ to?" she grunted, barely glancing up.

"We all just introduced ourselves. You don't get to sit that out just because you're a bitch." Vicki complained in a haughty sort of way.

"Bitch, I am _the_ bitch." Lois snapped back, voice full of confidence. "You only _wish_ you were at my level."

If the awkward silence that followed had a sensation to it, it definitely would have been the same frosty chill of the winter wind that came off the lake. It must have been Lois whom the professor had called out on the whole Lack of Teamwork thing, becase Clark had never seen a person _less_ inclined to get along. Lois _looked_ calm and relaxed, but with her less than a meter away, Clark could easily hear the heavy ***thump-thump*** of her heart; like angry stomping feet. _Almost_ hear the tendons creaking around her fists and it didn't take much to see how white her knuckles were. Her shoulders were stiff, arms crossed, one leg over the other and squeezing. She was not pleased about this whatsoever, but she also seemed to be making every effort to restrain herself.

Nonetheless, the tension at the table seemed to increase. Kassidy shifted nervously like she was going to bolt and Vicki's glare was nothing shy of threatening. Boomer had clenched a fist and Eric was surveying everyone with a thoughtful eye, like he was trying to determine whose defense he would jump to first.

_None of these people like her!_ Clark realized with a zing of panic. The other four had had prior encounters with her and had come away negative opinions and now they were expecting the worst from her and that was such a _horrible_-

"Hi, I'm Clark!" he said brightly, almost shouted. He tried to inject some cheerfulness into his voice, hoping to dispel the frosty silence. He didn't know how well it worked, but at least it diverted everyone's attention on to him. Then Boomer's fist unclenched and he grinned companionably.

"Hey Clark. Good to meetcha." He reached out and thumped the previously-clenched fist right into Clark's shoulder. "What field of journalism are you thinkin' about?"

"I, uh... I guess I'm in the same boat. I haven't really thought about- that." Clark admitted, shrugging. It seemed like a very good idea to graduate first and then get hired. He could worry about the specifics after he had job security.

"It's very nice to meet you." Vicki flashed Clark a friendly and very white smile that was at odds with the frowny lines the make-up highlighted. "Since Professor Carter expects us to work together, I think we should come up with stories that have some sort of connectedness. A theme. I think the professor will like that so much better than six separate ones, so let's start brainstorming..."

With that, she whipped out a notebook and a pen with a fluffy pink topper, and then Eric and Boomer were arguing too loudly for anyone else to get a word in sideways. Clark tuned them out and shifted just enough to put Lois at a clearer angle in his peripheral vision.

Every college department had its legend and its cryptid. The journalism department's legend had been a coffee brew-master of such proportions that he'd ended up dropping out to run his own coffee cart instead and now made a tidy living around campus with his tasty and sometimes lethal brews.

Its cryptid sat right next to him.

Lois Lane had been _notorious_ by the end of the first semester. Clark had a slim idea what had caused her to rise to such levels of infamy in just two and a half months, though he wasn't sure how much of it was true. In their first year, it was said that Lois had been seen walking around campus with a gas canister, but everyone had been going between frat parties so the witnesses had been a little drunk. Not long after that, a tree planted in the memory of Wallace Luthor was reported to have caught fire, but Lois had been drinking coffee in a late night very public cafe well off campus by the time anyone thought maybe she had had something to do with that.

But even without a definitive connection, it didn't take much to get a rumor mill churning. By the time classes had let out for the winter holidays, everyone had known _something_ about her, even if they had never seen her before or shared a class with her or anything like that. Talking about her in any capacity required at least one beer and hushed tones, as it speaking her name too loudly while sober was enough to summon her.

"Hey, Clark. You got anything you want to add to this?" Eric asked.

Clark looked at the (short) list that had been cultivated so far and found that he couldn't read Vicki's handwriting upside down. "No?"

"Why would he? All your ideas are stupid." Lois said, speaking up for probably the first time going by Vicki's scowl. Her tone was thoroughly bland and drier than crusted-on oatmeal.

"I don't see _you_ contributing anything useful." Vicki accused.

"Like you'd listen?"

"Try us."

Vicki smirked, but Lois smirked back like she already knew she was going to win.

"Between the three of you, you've offered up nothing but sports and celebrities and fashionista whoo-hah. Professor Asshole isn't looking for fluff. If you turn in fluff, he'll probably make you stand in the Shame Corner." Lois said, making a gesture at the front corners of the room. "I've seen his type. He fancies himself a connoisseur of philosophy and the human condition. He wants current events. He wants politics. He wants law and justice. He wants in-depth analyses on those relevant topics. It's an election year. We've got one candidate scrambling across the country holding Nazi-style rallies and advocating for white nationalism while encouraging Russia to meddle in the election. We've got extreme right-wingers touting fascist ideology. This country has been in a hole for the last four years that's getting deeper all the time and all you want to is talk about Hosanna Shriver's latest cosmetic line and her fling with Chase Lefevre?"

She was on to something there, Clark wouldn't hesitate to admit. Metropolis wasn't the only city in America that was slowly falling apart. It was happening everywhere in most of the major cities around the country. From Hoboken to Spokane. From Los Angeles all the way back to New York City. From San Francisco down to Miami and back up to Boston. Increased crime rates, corruption in the police and government, an overall sense that everyone was one traffic jam away from stabbing their bus-mate with a pen. Clark was just more aware of it happening in Metropolis because he lived here. And now this year had what was shaping up to be an extremely heated election cycle and tempers were getting prickly all across the board.

Kassidy wore a considering look, but she was the only one. Boomer and Eric exchanged that skirted around outright condescension and chuckled softly, while Vicki gasped at the thin implication that she was shallow.

"So, you think we should focus on social justice issues?" she demanded, apparently offended by this.

"I'm sorry it hurts you to be aware of the way in which human rights are manifested in the everyday lives of people at every level of society and how the people in charge want to restrict your ability to exercise those rights." Lois said with a smile that was not meant to be kind. "In any case, there's far more connected material to work with and it'll satisfy the professor's sad little boner. We have everything from government corruption to dirty cops to a guy out there crushing guns with his bare hands_-_-"

Eric snorted. "That's a rumor."

"No, I hear it's true, actually." Boomer said in a placating tone. But the condescension was back when he turned to Lois. "It's okay if you wanna be a social justice snowflake, Lane, but some freak-job vigilante_-_-"

"Gun-Crushing Man is literally crushing guns and therefore making an actual physical tangible difference in the number of operational guns on the street." Lois said, talking over him. "Gun-Crushing Man is doing a better job than the cops at getting the gang fights under control. I stan Gun-Crushing Man."

_Gun crushing-_-_ Oh no! That's me!_ Clark realized with another zing of panic. _I've only been doing it for a few weeks and people outside the gangs and the police know I'm out there doing that?_

He wanted to cover his face with his hands, but he couldn't do that without looking weird. So he tried to be casual about resting his chin on his folded hands and restrained his panic under an appropriately thoughtful expression.

Boomer let out a snort like chainsaw. "He's terrorizing people_-_-"

"Oh no, those poor gang members being spooked away from trashing cars and throwing Molotovs into buildings. My heart bleeds for them." Lois interrupted. The dry, crusted-on oatmeal tone was back. "It's funny, but if you actually _dig around_, you'd realize that no Los Diabolos member is actually getting hurt by this guy. All of the injuries are coming from the police."

"Some freak is taking the law into his own hands. If you think I'm gonna waste time writing something stupid like that, you got another thing comin', Lane." Boomer said, his own tone distinctly threatening. He jabbed a finger at her in warning.

"It's not stupid." Clark said, feeling defensive because- well, this was literally _him_ they were talking about. "It's just insubstantial."

Lois whipped her head around to glare at him. "What?"

"It's insubstantial." Clark repeated.

"You said that, but what do you _mean_?" Lois asked. There was an intense glint in her eyes. For a second, Clark felt like the short one. It wasn't often anymore that he felt small.

"I mean..." Mentally, Clark scrambled around for a good reason that wasn't _I __**am**__ Gun-Crushing Man!_ and landed on: "Well, what evidence is there? Yeah, you could have some people on social media talking about it, but if it's just _words_ without good-quality pictures or video to back up_-_\- Ya know, really solid evidence. Then it's just- It's just that, it's words. Words are easier to refute. They're easier to twist. And then you've got the problem that social media is really good at inflating rumors and throwing in misinformation. Obviously there's people who think that- that Gun-Crushing Man is just a rumor and I'll be honest, this is my first time hearing about it too. And getting _any_ confirmation that Gun-Crushing Man really does exist would require you to go either to the police or right to Los Diabolos themselves, but if even the police aren't talking, then hardly anyone is."

_So who on earth spread the rumor in the first place?_ Clark wondered next. He had been bothering Los Diabolos and their off-shoots for weeks _-_\- almost the entire summer _-_\- but last night had been the first time the police had taken any interest in him. Maybe it taken Angry Cop that long to convince his superiors that Gun-Crushing Man was worth dealing with. But there'd hardly been a whisper on social media. As far as Clark could tell, his presence on the streets wasn't going much _beyond_ the streets. Not a threat to the police and not a weakness Los Diabolos wanted to expose.

He half-expected Lois to argue back, for the sake of it, if no other reason. But her expression turned thoughtful rather than confrontational and she visibly subsided. There was nothing _defeated_ there, but Clark could tell that he had given her something to think on.

"Yeah!" Boomer slapped Clark across the shoulder and shot him a double thumbs-up.

"_Finally_." Vicki heaved a relieved-sounding sigh. "Let's get back to work."

By the end of the ninety-minute class, Clark thought they would have made more progress in smaller teams or even groups of two. He got the impression that since Professor Carter had not been pleased about having to group them together, he had decided to team them up with people they couldn't stand, and thus ensure that they would work alone regardless.

Real dick move.

It sure was the case for Clark's unfortunate team. They didn't so much as agree on two more items to the list (actress Jessica Clarke and media mogul Harrison Haller Shaw, two hot-ticket gossip topics) so much as Vicki scribbled them down and no one disagreed with her. Then they drifted. Boomer and Eric kept going around in circles on whether or not their fake editorials should be about regular sports or X-treme sports. Vicki spent the last thirty minutes of class acquainting Kassidy with the contents of a fashion magazine. Lois had pulled out her phone and didn't look up for the entire rest of the class no matter what anyone said.

This was a team that was definitely not going to get along.

Professor Carter must have been thrilled.

Any placebo buzz from the coffee had worn off long before Professor Carter released them and Clark escaped the overly warm and overwhelmingly lilacky classroom with the beginning of a tension headache gnawing at the base of his skull. He needed a pick-me-up like nothing else. He needed calming tea and something with a sprinkle of chocolate (painkillers were usually a no-go unless they were like super-illegal-strength smuggled over from Canada). He needed at least an hour where he didn't have to think about what the rest of the year was going to be like.

There were some nice cafes and coffee houses in the little shopping plaza and he had plenty of time to kill before his next class. A hot cup of tea and a sturdy wi-fi connection in a relatively un-trendy establishment where he could do some research for his fake editorial.

Clark made it down to the ground floor when Boomer swept up behind him and threw an arm around his shoulders. A wave of body spray engulfed him. It wasn't Axe, but it was just as unpleasantly cloying. The massive thews started squeezing.

"Hey, Clark, buddy, pal. You got a minute?" Boomer asked, but didn't wait for a reply. "Listen, Clark. My guy, my bro. You seem like a good guy. So I'm gonna warn ya right out. You listening? Man, you gotta tell me you're listening, cuz this is hella important."

"Yeah, I'm listening." Clark assured him. Anything to hurry along the removal of Boomer's person from his presence.

"Okay, _sooo_ important." Boomer repeated, like he was making sure that one was driven in. "So you never met Lois Lane before, right? You had that look on your face. People get that look when they meet her for the first time. So here's the thing. Don't get involved with Lane. Like, _at all_. In any way. She's toxic. Like poison, man. Total bitch. I had two classes with her first year. It was awful. Always told her to smile, but she wouldn't for nothing. Let me tell you, she doesn't give a shit about anyone but herself. Stay away from a bitch like that, man."

Clark's mood went from exhausted to angry in point three six seconds flat and it hit him in a cold slow clenching kind of way, exacerbated by the dull thump of an oncoming headache. Boomer, for all his well-meaning intentions, had just stepped on his every pet peeve when it came to interacting with women. His parents had taught to be a respectful gentleman and that was exactly what he aspired to be every day, goddammit.

"Maybe Lois has to give a shit about herself first and foremost because no one else will." Clark fired back, shoving the thick arm off his shoulders and stepping away. "Maybe she acts the way she does because people like you are shitty towards her."

Boomer looked startled. "What? No, c'mon, she's just_-_-"

"Don't finish that statement." Clark ordered fiercely, so much so that the larger man's jaw clacked shut. "If you start disrespecting any women in earshot of me _-_\- Lois Lane or anyone else who doesn't want a thing to do with you _-_\- you will catch these hands."

"Pfft, I'd cream you in one punch." Boomer said confidently. For a second, he looked prepared to throw down right then and there, all wound up in the shoulders. "But I'm a nice guy, so I won't fight you. Cuz ya do seem like a good guy, Clark. I was just tryin' to warn you. Lane is _the_ bitch. The moment you take your eyes off her, she'll shove you in front of a bus and shit on what's left."

He said this with the kind of seriousness that came from personal experience. Then he thumped a meaty hand onto Clark's shoulders several times like he was demonstrating his strength and vacated, taking most of his excessive body-spray with him. Clark slumped, both a little relieved and disappointed that there hadn't been a fight. Sure he could splinter a jawbone, but taking the arrogance out of Boomer's strut would have been nice too.

"Hmm, for a moment, I thought you two were gonna end up fighting." came Lois's voice from over his shoulder and he turned to find her standing there with an almost half-smile. "Pretty sure he'd paste you if you threw hands with him."

Clark shrugged. "It's really more about the fact I _would_ fight him, not whether I'd win or lose."

Lois looked him over. "You'd probably lose." she opined.

Clark shrugged again. He was aware of the fact that while he was a tall person at six-foot-three, he wasn't really a _large_ person. Most of his two hundred and forty pounds was wrapped in a dense skeleton. He could yeet a hay bale fifty meters, but his musculature didn't bulge to the same proportions as Boomer's.

"What was that about anyways?" Lois wondered, moving a little closer, a short cautious step.

There was no tone of expectation

"Something tells me you heard most of that." Clark commented.

Lois nodded. "I did. I tend to eavesdrop whenever I hear my name." she admitted. "If it's me they're talking about, I like to know what the rumors are." The almost half-smile came back. "Sounded to me like you were prepared to throw hands to defend my honor. Very flattering of you, but why?"

_Because no one else was about to._ Clark thought, and immediately dismissed the idea of saying that out loud. He rubbed his hands together nervously. "I just think Boomer was being very shitty towards you for no good reason and that's just_-_\- not fair. You're_-_\- You're not supposed to treat _anyone_ like that." he said. _Be kind_, his parents had told him the morning he'd left for Metropolis, two years ago. _Be kind to your classmates, you don't know where they've come from._

"Er, I'm sorry, I'm probably overstepping_-_-"

"No, no, no, that's very chivalrous of you. All for little ol' me." Lois looked amused by the incredibly novel concept that someone would fight on her behalf. "Wow, this is some Twilight Zone kind of bullshit I walked into today. I can't remember the last time someone fought for my honor. Oh wait, it's never happened."

The abrupt bitterness was like a slap. Like a bad smell seeping into the air. And then there were his parents' faces looming in his mind's eye and the advice they had imparted to him ringing in his ears.

Be kind.

"Miss_-_\- er, Lois. Are you, um, free for the next hour?" Clark asked, the words spilling out of his mouth before he had the chance to think about them. "It's just my next class isn't for a few more hours and I need a pick-me-up and I'm wondering if_-_\- if maybe you'd like to join me?"

His voice hit a squeaky decibel by the last word.

Lois stared him, puzzled.

"You don't have to!" he almost shouted, panicked.

"Are you asking me on a date?" Lois inquired suspiciously.

_Oh, it does sort of sound like one, doesn't it. _Clark realized. Oh god, why had he said it at all? Well, he already had one foot in the deep end of the pool; might as well just chuck the rest of him in too.

"Calling this a date would imply more familiarity with each other than we actually have." he said. "Look, I don't_-_\- I've never met you and I'm sure some of the stories are_-_\- _very_ exaggerated and I don't want to _judge_ based on someone else's negative opinion. That's rude and it's not fair to the person. So I would like to treat you to_-_ \- _brunch_, I guess, because I_-_\- want to_-_\- _not_ judge you..."

He trailed off, not sure where that sentence was going or how he was supposed to finish it.

Lois regarded him for a long moment, a dozen emotions flickering across her face. "You've never asked a girl out before." she concluded. This was awkward, but also kind of endearing? This guy was trying, which was a bit more than anyone else had done. "Well, as long as you're paying, I have nothing to lose. Brunch it is."

Clark blinked. "Really?"

"Really." Lois smiled at him. It was a little dry and a little more like a smirk, but it was there. "Clark- Clark, right? Listen, do you like crepes? There's this French-run place nearby that does the best crepes I've ever had outside of Europe and they're not too expensive either and I haven't had one in weeks."

"Crepes are good." Clark agreed, bulldozing his way through the surprise because he'd been half-expecting for Lois to say 'no'. Why _was_ she saying 'yes'? He made an after-you gesture. "Uh, lead the way."

It was definitely a smirk she flashed at him when she sashayed past, but there were no sharp edges to it. Clark adjusted the straps of his backpack and followed, suddenly becoming _very aware_ of what he was doing. Coffee and crepes with the campus cryptid.

Well, it wasn't the craziest thing he had done.

* * *

-0-

he doing his best u guys


	3. Good Idea, Bad Idea

I don't have chapter 8 complete, but this one was all polished so what the hell.

For those curious, Clark's powers currently include: enhanced physical condition (strength, speed, senses, stamina, durability, etc), a healing factor, the ability to leap small buildings in a single bound, a mild form of x-ray vision, and the ability to see on the infrared and ultraviolet spectrums. (Krypton had a red sun and red suns give off far less visible light than yellow suns, so Clark being able to see infra-red and ultraviolet is more of an evolutionary trait that just gets souped up by the yellow sun.)

He has not yet developed: heat vision, super-breath, sustained flight (or anything else).

At this point, Clark hasn't really been in the position to test out the limits of his powers. Like, he's bulletproof, but he's not going to get shot if he doesn't have to. So he doesn't know he's bulletproof.

* * *

Chapter Three: Good Idea, Bad Idea

"Clark Kent." Lois punted the syllables across her tongue.

She kind of liked his name. It was short and punchy with hard, crisp sounds and the alliteration made it easy to remember. It was a friendly kind of name, one that would look good in a byline. A name that could easily become a household brand, if the right tone was invoked, if his articles spoke to the right audience.

"Clark Kent." She rolled the syllables this time, drawing them out.

Lois had known the guy for all of fifteen minutes, yet just saying his name gave her an oddly trusting feeling. 'Clark Kent' was the name of a man who had nothing to hide. A name like 'Lex Luthor' invoked a sense of unease even if you didn't know the history behind it. It had a slithery kind of feel coming out of your mouth, like the very sound of it was trying to escape your tongue and wiggle back down your throat and you had to spit it out. Whereas 'Clark Kent' burst forth bright and loud like a ray of sunshine.

There was nothing shady about the name 'Clark Kent'.

That name brought in a vibe that Lois was hard-pressed to put into words. She was quite skilled at being able to articulate her feelings into words, but the vibe, the impression, the tingle that she got from the likes of Clark Kent - all the way from his fluffy hair to the scuffed toes of his shoes - eluded her beyond the reaction of: _ooh me likey._

He was easy on the eyes; that helped a bit. A sturdy six-foot-plus in height with good strong shoulders and classically handsome features that reminded Lois of someone like Gregory Peck or a young Marlon Brando. Clean clothes, a nice smell, a good-looking face (glasses overwhelmed it a bit), and a reassuring navy-blue eye color. Clean-cut and sort of dapper. Lois didn't think of herself as the kind of person who had a mental checklist when it came to good looks; she liked to think that she wasn't judging like that. But if she had one, then Clark Kent certainly ticked off in all the boxes.

But that wasn't the _only_ reason she had agreed to coffee and crepes with him.

Right?

Right.

Absolutely.

Clark was the only member of the so-called team that she hadn't previously met and now she was going to spend her last year of college in his company, so it was imperative that to scope him out and get a sense for the kind of person he was. The others were a lost cause. Had been for years. Boomer was too full of himself, too invested in the image of toxic masculinity to give it up. Eric was about as exciting as the white suburban mom's idea of spicy and he tended to mimic the stronger personalities around him. A month from now and he'd be a copycat of Boomer. Vicki wanted nothing more than to stand at the center of everyone's attention. Kassidy was largely inoffensive, but it looked like Vicki was planning to suck the girl into her orbit.

Clark, on the other hand, had rejected Boomer's warning and potentially an offer of bro-ship as well. He had threatened to fight the guy over disrespecting women. Lois didn't want to go so far as to say Clark had also defended her (that implied more than she was comfortable with), but it was clear enough that he didn't agree with Boomer's mentality.

And he was treating her to crepes and coffee.

But Lois knew better than to judge on just these actions. Sometimes the nicest guys made for the worst assholes.

She needed to test him. Preferably on something far more involved than just him posturing at Boomer Williams and threatening to lay him out. Some guys were just ready to throw hands for the sake of throwing hands, so it wasn't much of a measuring stick. There had to be a way she could peel back the outer layers and see _exactly_ what Clark Kent was made of.

She was stuck with him until next May, after all.

Le Trèfle de Feu was the end of the shopping plaza, nestled up against a thick barrier of evergreens that separated the plaza from the residential streets. There was seating inside and out; a balcony floor inside and a raised deck out by the evergreens. There was a corner of the deck where it was harder to hear the traffic, muffled by the greenery. The coffee shop had been Lois's little hide-away for almost six years. It was just a touch on the expensive side for her budget, but it wasn't like she was paying this time.

Clark emerged from the coffee shop onto the deck and made his way over to the corner table, balancing a tray of two drinks, a plate of crepes, and a bowl of chopped fruit on the side. Lois raised her gaze at the crepes, perfectly crispy with a light dusting of powdered sugar and a drizzle of chocolate syrup. Just the scent of the coffee was a panacea for the stress left over from class.

Clark slid the tray onto the table. "That one is yours." he said, pointing to the light-colored coffee. "I ordered two fruit crepes and two that are sort of breakfasty. There's eggs and sausage bits and green onions and good stuff like that. Is that okay? It's just you didn't mention a preference."

"I've worked my way down the menu. They have yet to make a bad crepe." Lois said, bringing her coffee to her. Mmm, this smelled like a good French roast. "Some of them are so-so, but _bad _like holy shit why did you think this was a good idea?... Hasn't happened yet." She sipped the coffee experimentally. "No alcohol? It's not brunch without a little bit alcohol."

"It didn't occur to me to ask, but I'm not twenty-one yet." Clark replied, settling into his chair.

Lois grinned. "Aww, you're practically a baby!"

"I'm _twenty_."

Clark sipped his tea; a light concoction of cardamom and rose water that tasted better than he'd expected. Not overwhelming and exactly what he'd needed. The vestiges of the tension headache faded the longer he was out under the sun and even his knee felt a lot better than it had earlier. The initial dark purple-blue bruising that banded his leg had turned yellow-green-brown by the time his morning alarm had gone off. It had ached a little on the ride in, but now it hardly twinged. He imagined that by the next time he looked, it would be like he hadn't been hit at all.

After she had demolished an entire crepe, Lois dusted her hands off. "All right, let's do this thing properly." she declared.

Clark looked up. "Do what?"

"If we're committing to this 'getting to know you' schtick, let's do it properly." Lois said again, and extended a hand across the table. "My name is Lois Lane and I'd like to formally apologize for being grumpy and anti-social during class."

"Ah." Clark caught on, and took the extended hand. The handshake that ensued was strong and firm. "I'm Clark Kent. I accept your apology and I, uh, forgive you, given the company we were in. I've_-_\- heard all the stories. You have a reputation around campus."

"All lies." Lois said, grinning wide. There were too many teeth.

Clark doubted they were _all_ lies. By like, _a lot_.

"Do you have a favorite?" Lois inquired.

"What?"

"Do you have a favorite. Everyone seems to have a favorite. Everyone likes the one where I supposedly filled the Kappa Xi sorority's pool with Orbies and they found me chilling with a margarita beside my hard work."

"Is that one real?" Clark wondered. He had always doubted it because it would have taken a lot of work for one person to fill up a fairly large swimming pool with Orbies in the span of a few hours without anyone spotting them in the process.

Lois grinned wider still. "No, you're not going to get an answer _that_ easily. A lady has to have some secrets." she said, wagging a finger. "So, Clark Kent." she went on briskly, changing the subject. "I could swear I've seen you before this. Did we have any classes together?"

"No, I don't think so." Clark said. Not that he could recall, at any rate. "We must have crossed paths around campus a few times, though."

"Yeah, that's probably it." Lois agreed. "I definitely would have remembered your jaw line."

"My_-_\- jaw line?"

"Yes. Your lantern square all-American jaw line. You could crack a coconut on that thing. I'm very impressed with it."

Clark touched his jawline curiously and for a fleeting, but none-too-subtle second, Lois wished that was her hand in its place. The army was full of square-jawed men, but of such size that it always seemed to overwhelm their face. Like the underbite of a bulldog.

Maybe was due to Clark Kent still having all of his hair. Balanced things out on both ends.

_Look at that floof, it's not even gelled. He just combed it over and managed to keep it that way. It looks so soft, my god, I've never wanted to put my fingers in someone else's hair more in my life._ Lois thought. She wrapped both hands around the coffee mug, just in case her hands decided to go against orders from the brain. "How's your small talk?"

"Um, bad?" Clark guessed.

"Mine's worse." Lois grinned, then it turned into a thoughtful frown. "Are you _sure_ we didn't have any classes together before? Because I'm still over here _swearing_ that I've seen you before. Maybe we went to the same high school?..."

Clark shook his head. "Definitely not. I didn't grow up in Metropolis. I grew up in Kansas. Any chance you might have visited?"

Lois shuddered. "Yes. Just once, but I made a point not to do any sight-seeing. I stayed inside. I was twelve and half of Kansas was on fire." she said pointedly.

"Oh, the brush-fires a few years back? You must have been east of Topeka, then." Clark commented. That had been a very dry summer and it had taken only one misplaced spark to get the flames roaring up the parched yellow prairie grass. "I lived west of that."

"So we never crossed paths before, is what you're saying?" Lois concluded, and got a confirming nod. Strange, she still could have sworn... Never mind. "Anyways, Kansas definitely isn't on my list of places to play tourist. I'm so sorry you had to grow up there."

"It wasn't that bad." Clark assured her. "The cicadas are awful, Texas is only two hours away, there's an annual bet about how many tornadoes we'll get in a season, a meteor shower nearly flattened us once, and our town founder was so horny he contributed to about two percent of the present-day population, but Smallville wasn't a bad place to grow up."

It occurred to him not a second later, as he caught sight of the _baffled_ expression on Lois's face, that he probably could have phrased that differently. It was true, though. Smallville hadn't been a bad place to grow up. A friendly, if not necessarily _close-knit_, community that could still band together after bad weather and clear the roads and made sure no one got up to any _funny business_ before the power came back on. It was a peaceful bucolic farming town that was becoming vanishingly rare to stumble across.

The meteors had been a one-time thing.

Two-time thing.

Whatever, that had happened fourteen years apart.

Lois shook her head. "I'm not sure which part of that was worse. Do I ask about the tornadoes or the meteor shower_-_\- Wait! Wait!" She flailed her hands. "Did you say that the town was named 'Smallville'? _Small_ ville? For real? What possessed the horny town founder to call it that? Was Bigville already taken?"

Clark adjusted his glasses. "Smallville's historical society tries to pretend that Ezra Small didn't have an inferiority complex. Or_-_\- sex with men, for that matter."

Or sexual proclivities _at all_, on that note. The historical society seemed to prefer that Mr. Small was pure and virginal as the driven snow. A sweet kindly old grandpa-figure instead of having been a cantankerous horny middle-aged man when he had declared Smallville into existence back in the eighteen-thirties.

He also might have been cursed by a Kiowa shaman, but the sweet old ladies helming the historical society had had a collective aneurysm the last time anyone (Clark) had tried to make a discussion out of that.

"Ah, a horny on main bisexual disaster with small dick energy and a taste for drama. Explains a lot." Lois commented. "This is gonna come out weird, especially coming from me_-_-" She made a vague gesture at her face as if to point out her mostly-Asian features. "But you don't sound like you're from Kansas."

"Nah, I tend to sound more like I'm from Oklahoma." Clark said, letting the Kansas-Okie drawl back into his voice, grinning at Lois's initially startled expression. "Smallville's in the southwest corner. Most of us sound like that. But some of my professors had a bug up their butts about it, so I figured I shouldn't sound like anything at all." he added, sliding back into the generic Midwestern. It was easy; he was used to switching back and forth. The north didn't like it when he sounded like the south, and the south liked it even less when he sounded like he was from the north.

Lois thought for a moment. "I like it." she said.

"You do?"

"Yeah, it's different."

Clark had only a soft "huh" in response to that.

"I was born on Ramstein Air Base." Lois said, since they were sharing the deets.

"Isn't that in Rhineland-Palatinate?"

"Oh, you know where that is! No one ever knows where it is!"

"One of my house-mates this year is from Freiburg. Since I had no idea where Freiburg was, I did a little reading." Clark said, smiling. _She has a really nice smile. How come when all the stories go around no one ever says she has a nice smile? Why do they always focus on the bad parts?_

"Yeah, we lived there 'til I was eight. Then it was six months in Singapore, four months in Japan, six months anywhere else. Pretty much moved around every couple of months until I was twelve, then my dad got assigned as liaison for one of the contract companies here in Metropolis." Lois added. There was a good chance that her father had assigned _himself_ to the position. He was high enough in the chain of command to get away with it. And she had a vague recollection of her mother talking about providing a more stable domestic life.

Once there had been a time when General Lane would have done anything to make his family happy.

Well, anything to make his wife happy.

Lois sipped on her coffee, chasing away the morose memories. Right, enough of this. That was enough personal information. Time to get down to business.

"There is something I wanted to talk to you about. I didn't agree to have coffee with you _just_ because you were paying." she said. Without waiting for him to react, she went on. "The thing is, you seem like the only sensible person on that farce of team besides myself. I think you might be able to help me with something."

"Like what?" Clark asked.

"Gun-Crushing Man."

_Shit_.

"You were right about the fact that there isn't enough there to make a really good story. And how the evidence isn't all that substantial either. Especially for a guy like Professor Asshole." Lois explained. "But I think there is something there that is worth pursuing. Something worth a much closer look."

_No there isn't. There isn't anything. I'm a big scary person you should stay away from me._ Clark thought frantically, though he felt more like a poofy kitten for all the intimidation he radiated.

Lois studied his face for a moment and then frowned. "You disagree."

"No." Clark assured her quickly. "No. Maybe. I don't know. I just_-_\- I think it would be a very hard thing to pursue. How would you go about researching something like that. Man. That man. How_-_\- How would you find the, um, the delineation that would separate the truth from any possible hoaxes? What if the whole thing is actually a hoax cooked up the police and Mayor Berkowitz's administration to add credibility to the recent push to arm the police with more military-grade weaponry?"

_Oh yes! That sounds very smart!_

"Well, that's where the research comes in." Lois said brightly. "That is a very plausible theory, by the way. I could totally see the mayor's administration pulling a stunt like that. Except for one little thing. I've seen Gun-Crushing Man in action. I don't think this guy is a government-sponsored hoax."

_She saw..._ Clark raced back through his memories, trying to find the one singular instant that he might have passed by Lois Lane in the night. But that could have been any of them. If she had never stepped into his immediate line of sight, he likely had never noticed her.

"He's hard to track too, that doesn't help. He doesn't keep any patterns that I've been able to figure out." Lois said, messing with her phone. "I think he only shows up when the gangs start fighting, but he moves _so fast_. I never get there until it's all over. I was lucky to get just _this_ photo."

_Oh dear._ Clark thought.

But his dismay evaporated when Lois displayed the photo for him to see. It was a touch blurry and the lighting was far from good. Judging by the angle, Lois must have been close to the ground. The end result had produced a slightly smeared image of a black man-shaped figure that failed to really pop out of the background. The only part that stood out was the electric blue glow where his eyes must have been. It was the kind of image quality that would lead a casual observer to dismiss it as a hoax.

"It's not- very good." he said.

"Who cares if it's _good_. The point is I got it." Lois said, yanking her phone away. "This is proof for myself that I'm not just chasing a rumor or a ghost. There's something real about it and I think that something is worth a deeper look. We _owe_ it a deeper look."

Clark stared, words leaking out of his brain. He didn't know what kind of response he had been expecting, but nothing like _that_. That wasn't an '_oh i think it would fun to do'_ reaction. That was an iron-strong sense of conviction. The sense that there was a moral obligation to carry out this duty.

It took Clark a moment to find words again. "I'm not going to say you shouldn't look deeper... But, Lois... Why? Wh-What do you believe is there to find?" he asked, genuinely curious to understand where this was coming from.

Lois was silent for a moment, as though she was weighing out her next words. She helped herself to a fortifying gulp of coffee.

"As a kid, did you have a favorite superhero? Mine was Wonder Woman." she said. "Look, I have my reasons for wanting to do this, I just_-_-" She grimaced, looking away. "You'll think they're stupid. You don't have to help_-_-"

"No." Clark interrupted, because _now_ he saw what she was getting at. "Your reasons aren't stupid, Lois. America is an absolute septic tank right now. Metropolis might as well be sinking into the lake. The thought of there being someone out there with extraordinary abilities who's using them to do some good and that they could, in theory, follow in the footsteps of the Justice Society... It's not stupid to want something like that. It's not stupid to want a light in the dark."

But did _Clark himself_ want that?

He was Gun-Crushing Man. _He_ was the person Lois wanted to find. The person Lois thought might have what it took to be a real proper hero like the Justice Society. But Clark didn't know if that was something he _could_ want for himself. He only had started doing this because there were just too many guns out there on the streets and the police weren't doing enough anymore. Was it a natural progression? Was it something he could grow into? He hadn't thought far ahead.

Maybe he hadn't considered that as a potential future.

_I just want to be a reporter. I'm just a farm boy from Kansas._ He thought, then mentally shrugged. _By way of some other planet entirely._

Lois scrutinized him for a moment. "You mean that. You really mean all that."

"I mean it." Clark nodded. _I'm just not sure how far I would go._ He thought. "The way things are right now, I would _love it_ if any of the Justice Society came back to clear the way for us."

"That would require most of them to be brought back from the dead." Lois pointed out. "Generation Next is going to have to create its own way forward, Smallville."

Out of the original nineteen, fifteen members of the Justice Society had passed away from old age or complications thereof. The Flash had been missing presumed dead for the past thirteen years. Doctor Fate and the Lantern were still alive and regularly seen in public, and so was Wonder Woman if you believed a forum full of very dedicated superhero-trackers. But they were definitely leaving the rest of the world to its own devices, as required of them by a unanimous vote by the UN.

"Yeah." Clark agreed. "Wait, did you just call me 'Smallville'?"

"My personal reasons aside," Lois said loudly. "If we can prove indisputably that Gun-Crushing Man exists, is not a government-sponsored hoax, and really _is_ someone acting of their own initiative, this gives us some really good topics for our fake not-fake editorials that should put us_-_\- well, _me_ at least, in good with Professor Asshole _and_ meet the politics and philosophy stuff that he likes so much. The social and moral decay and all the factors that cause a man to turn to vigilante justice? That's not _one_ editorial. That's several. This winds back to _nineteen-eighty-nine_. We could tie up the whole year in a series of fake editorials on the topic."

"Superheroes and the way their absence has dramatically impacted the social culture, morality, and politics of America." Clark mused. That had a sharp ring to it.

Lois snapped her fingers. "Now you're gettin' it!"

"We should come up with less difficult to research ideas for this week." Clark suggested. "Proving indisputably that, uh, Gun-Crushing Man exists, then proving that he's not any sort of hoax, and _then_ proving that he's in it for real... That's going to be some work. I don't think we're going to manage that in time to write up something decent before next Monday."

"Good point. Start with the crime rates. Or Luthor."

"Why Luthor?"

"Why _not_?" Lois challenged. "Let me tell you something about Lex Luthor, Smallville. He's a mad scientist of Frankenstein calibre wrapped up in smooth sophistication of a cold, heartless machine of a businessman asexually budded from a long line of evil bald men trying to rule the world through technological advancements and hair replacement formulas. He's rich, he's powerful, and he owns half of Metropolis. His name is considered a natural disaster for the effect it has on people. And he's rotten to the core. He papers himself in money, but you can't hide the stench of moral decay."

"Is he actually _that_ bad?-"

"Yes." Lois interrupted emphatically. "Use your head, Smallville. When was the last time you knew about any billionaire who wasn't a capitalist pig getting fat and rich off the backs of the working class?"

"The_-_\- The Waynes?"

"Which ones? Vandeveer Wayne the Third or his dead cousins?"

Clark winced. "Don't put it like that."

"They _are_ dead." Lois said pointedly. "So I'm not sure they count anymore. And they left everything to their son, but I don't think he's old enough to even take a driving test yet, so I guess we'll have to with-hold judgment. And they were generally decent people. But the _other_ Wayne Junior is a complete _moron-_\- Like, I'm not sure you could meet a person more stupid who isn't already running for president than Vandeveer Wayne the Third. I'd probably _want_ him running for president because he'd have all of Gotham breathing down the back of his neck to make sure he doesn't fuck it up. But this is about Luthor. If you want to talk about why Metropolis is practically sinking into the lake, Lex Luthor is a pretty big part of it. If you want to talk about the _ridiculous_ amount of guns finding their way into the hands of Los Diabolos and the other gangs, then you should be aware that Luthor is the _de facto_ architect of that pipeline. He isn't the source of _all_ of Metropolis's problems, but he's not exactly going out of his way to make them better. He benefits financially from the problems created by other people, so _of course_ he's not in a rush to get them fixed. There's a line between Luthor, the gangs, and Gun-Crushing Man_-_\- What? What is that face for?"

Clark had winced again. "Can we come up with a better name than Gun-Crushing Man? It sounds stupid. I'm having a hard time saying it with a straight face." he said. It was accurate, yes, but it wasn't really anything else.

"If I see him do anything other than crush guns, I'll consider it." Lois said. She snapped her fingers some more. "We can start with the problems that Metropolis is dealing with- or, _not_ dealing with, as the case may be. And outline the potential causes thereof. Once we slide that one past Professor Asshole, we can dig in deeper. This guy is the first metahuman I've heard about since the government basically outlawed them, so I am _very curious_ to start digging."

"Okay. But isn't that the problem?" Clark inquired.

"Hmm?"

"You just said the government practically outlawed metahumans. Well, superheroes. You want to find this guy, and I get that, a little. But aren't you worried that you're going expose him whether he likes it or not?"

Lois's determined expression faded into a sort of scandalized thoughtfulness. Clark got the feeling that she just hadn't thought far enough ahead with the Find Gun-Crushing Man plan. Nothing deliberately malign with her intentions; just plain old vanilla-flavored short-sightedness.

"Yeah, I didn't think of that." Lois admitted. "That's not very good journalistic integrity of me, is it."

"And _then_, there's the fact that actually looking for this guy might not be a good idea. If superheroes as a thing is basically illegal now." Clark added with the enthusiasm of someone trying to change the subject.

But Lois shook her head. "No, we need to at least look _because_ it's a bad idea."

Clark stared and blinked and stared some more. "Um, Lois... You don't do things because they're bad ideas."

"Actually, that's _exactly_ why you do them." Lois said brightly. "Listen, I know what I'm talking about here. Sometimes, things look like bad ideas because people _want_ them to look like bad ideas. That how political pundits on TV try and sell you on the idea that universal healthcare is bad. Gotham City has universal healthcare. And a completely free public transportation system. And then someone goes 'hey we should implement these cool ideas into other cities cuz if Gotham can pull it off without their hospital system collapsing, we can too'. And then basically the entire Republican party will rise up like the Kracken and scream about how these are clearly bad ideas because Gotham is a bad idea incarnate and go off on some tangent that Gotham is the way it is because of whacky ideas like universal healthcare and free public transportation while ignoring the obvious problems. I've learned that if someone is trying to tell you a thing is a bad idea, it might be because it's actually a good idea and they don't want you to figure that out."

Clark took a moment to digest that line of reasoning and whilst palatable, it probably wasn't going to sit well long term.

"It's _kind of _sound." he admitted.

"Kind of?" Lois repeated in a slightly skeptical tone, catching his minute hesitation.

"I don't think I could go along with it as a means of justifying my actions. A bad idea is usually a bad idea _because_ it's a bad idea." Clark said firmly. If he could _just_ get her off track...

"Ooh, that sounds like quitter talk. I bet Mama didn't raise no quitter."

"Ma didn't raise no quitter, but she also didn't raise a fool who acts on impulse."

Lois leaned forward. "So you're calling me impulsive?"

"Not in so many words." Clark said delicately.

"I think you're calling me impulsive." Lois declared, but grinning like she was enjoying this. "But I think you're impulsive too."

"In what way?"

"Coffee and crepes with a lady you hardly know? That's impulse."

"I was being polite."

"Being polite on impulse is a good thing, don't get me wrong, but you're still here. Sitting at this table. With me." Lois said, grinning wider. "So here we are. What are you going to do now?"

"Well, whatever you're planning, something tells me it would be a bad idea to let you go at it alone." Clark said. It would be better to stick with her for a bit. He was durable enough to take any hits for her and also he could track her progress on Gun-Crushing Man and maybe stop her before she got too deep.

Lois smirked, a sharp-looking thing that could cut fingers right off. Like she had both the jaw-strength and the wherewithall to chew through the trunk of a small tree. Given the things Clark had heard about her, he doubted that assessment was far off.

It gave him the willies.

"I'm glad you think that." she said. "Because you're going to help me."

Clark sweated. _Why does that sound like a threat?_

"There is no way we're going to get a word out of the police, so we're gonna have to go all the way to the bottom. Los Diabolos themselves. Now I'm crazy, but I'm not _that_ crazy. I'm not going to go anywhere near an LD nest without someone watching my back. Are you up for that, Smallville?"

"Why are you calling me 'Smallville'?" Clark wondered.

"Because you're a small town boy from a small town town." Lois said, explaining approximately nothing. "So, how 'bout it? Gonna follow me into hell or not?"

Clark shrugged. "Yes."

"Excellent." Lois rubbed her hands together. "We'll do it on Friday. Friday is traditional."

"That might not work. I have to work. Four to midnight. All weekend too. I can't take off. The manager won't schedule me for more hours."

"I know how that is. I'm underpaid and under-appreciated for all the work I do." Lois grumbled, rolling her eyes. "What about Thursday?"

"I _was_ trying to pick up a shift for Thursday, but I guess that's off."

"Perfect, they'll never see us coming."

She looked into her coffee cup and drained the rest of it in a few swallows. "Thursday, meet me at the train station near Queens Avenue around nine-thirty. It'll take us about half an hour to get where we need to go." she said, picking up her bag and stuffing her phone into one of the pockets.

"Wait, you know where to go?" Clark asked incredulously.

"I'll tell you about my misspent youth some time." Lois said, helping herself to the remaining egg-sausage-green onion crepe. "If anyone asks, you're going on a date."

"What?"

"Yeah, that's our cover story. We're going to see a movie."

"At ten in the morning?"

Lois snorted. "Morning? Did I say that? No, no, we're going after dark." she corrected. "Some beers followed by horror movie midnight madness matinee with the college student discount. Brilliant idea. It's a date, Smallville. I'll see you Thursday. Wear your running shoes."

Crepe securely in hand, she hustled out of there.

"Wait! Why?! Why are we going after dark?!" Clark called after her, but she booked it around the corner of the building and out of sight. He groaned, a long drawn-out sound, and then returned to his tea for solace.

Going right up to a nest of Los Diabolos in the revealing light of day was one thing, but after the sun was down? That sounded like a bad idea waiting to happen. That was a_-_\- What was that word Gothamites used? It was... murali. That was it. Dangerous, but only in the slowest, most methodical way possible. Only dangerous if you were actually trying to get into trouble.

_Oh god this is going to end so badly and I __**agreed**__ to throw myself into it._

But he had agreed to throw himself into it, tacitly promising to have Lois's back. And Clark Kent did not renege on his promises.

* * *

-0-

It's time for another Good Idea, Bad Idea.

Good idea: doing your homework.

Bad idea: getting arrested over doing your homework.

The end.


	4. A Warning Shot Across the Bow

Kickin' it in quarantine, my peeps.

This chapter's only been in existence for about three weeks, but I have total confidence in its ability to survive in the wild.

* * *

Chapter Four: A Warning Shot Across the Bow

Clark had spent enough time in the American education system that he knew to keep his expectations low. That way, he could still be surprised. Teachers with a dedication to their subject and something like a sense of humor was all that he had ever asked for.

Monday disappointed him, even with his already low expectations.

Feature Writing _sucked_ for obvious reasons. Editing wasn't anything exciting; he hadn't expected it to be, though. The professor was a small bland little man who reminded Clark of a library's card catalog and came in just about the same color and smell. He had started class with the assumption that they had all forgotten the specifics of grammar and punctuation.

That was not incorrect.

Clark couldn't remember the last time he had been concerned specifically about grammar.

So, Feature Writing was a wash and Editing was destined to be merely mediocre. By the time he was trying to smother himself with his pillow, there wasn't much doubt that Lois Lane's prickly personality was the _highlight_ of Clark's Monday.

Was that... depressing?

That seemed like it should be depressing. Like, at least a little bit.

Well...

_Well_...

Lois Lane was _interesting_.

And pretty. She had a very nice smile. And_-_-

No. He wasn't going to think about that.

Monday extinguished itself overnight like it was glad to be gone and the dark hours stayed quiet and undisturbed, at least within the range of Clark's prodigious hearing. On the far side of town, a pair of tiny street gangs got into a scrap over some trivial piece of territory and took to beating the snot out of the other. But even while they wailed on each other, they glanced around cautiously in between punches and retreated quickly from the street once they felt a significant thrashing had been delivered.

Clark didn't know it yet, but rumors were starting to do some of the work for him.

The sun rose on Tuesday morning over a Metropolis that didn't look any different than it had yesterday. Clark slept through his house-mates moving about. Birds made a raucous cacophony in the tree outside, but he slept through that too. He also slept through his first alarm and then the second. There wasn't a third because he'd never needed a third. The morning sun crept around to his bedroom window and into his eyes, finally waking him up. Then he caught sight of the time.

"Shit!"

Late, late, it was late!

He leapt out of bed, shedding clothes and grabbing the first things closest to him; his clothes from yesterday. No one would notice. He used the bathroom as fast as he could, dressed, and stuffed everything back into his bag. He didn't so much as sprint down the stairs as he leapt, going from the top landing to three-quarters of the way down in one large step.

"I can't believe it! I don't even need that much sleep!" he complained to the empty house as he banged backwards out the door, bike and everything else firmly in hand.

Lulled into a false sense of complacency because his only class of the day didn't start until ten. Well now it started in thirty minutes and it took twenty-five minutes just to get from here to the other side of the campus!

Breakfast was going to have to wait.

All the same, nine-thirty in the morning was a much more reasonable and sensible time to be out and about. The humidity hit like a pillow case full of doorknobs. A pall of gray clouds had begun to stretch across Metropolis from the west and there was the scent in the air that heralded rain. Peering above and sometimes through the buildings, Clark saw the distant profile of anvil clouds far back on the horizon. It looked that an end was in sight for the city's annual August drought. But that might not be for another couple of days yet. For now, the air was full of sticky humidity that made it feel six or seven degrees hotter than it actually was. There wasn't much of a breeze to stir things up.

There wasn't much traffic either, thankfully, because Clark tore through intersections with reckless abandon. A least a few people on the sidewalks shouted after him to slow down. Two years worth of instincts had kicked in; his job expected him to ignore red lights and other traffic safety things in the name of excellent customer service. Back across campus, on the paths that wound between green lawns, dormitory housing, and people who had to be encouraged to make room for a madman on a bike.

Clark wondered fleetingly if he would make better time just got off the bike and ran.

_Nah, being late for class isn't a life-threatening thing._

In any case, he hit the journalism corner of the campus with enough spare time to lace up his shoes properly.

The Culture of Social Media was conducted in the Merton Building, which was less of an uninspired brick and more an undefined amoeba shape. It pre-dated a period of sweeping architectural reform in which Metropolis had briefly done away with neat details and embraced extreme minimalism. The result was that the Merton Building was much more pleasing to the eye. It had symmetry, but it had all the neat little details that made it so nice to look at. The interior had that old British secondary school aesthetic going on; high ceilings, wood-paneled walls, and exposed rafter beams with an occasional window of stain-glass.

Clark didn't notice much of it, too busy lunging up the stairs to the next floor to take in the charming Old World aesthetic. He caught up with the back end of the stragglers just off the landing and slowed down to a normal walking pace. He had never had a class with the Weed Professor before, but he had heard positive things about the man and his teaching style. The general consensus was that he was pretty chill and probably didn't mind when his students came in just a minute or so late.

The only downside was that the Weed Professor was known as that for very obvious reasons. Clark sneezed several times in succession just entering the _hallway_ leading to the classroom; so loudly and explosively that several of his year-mates ahead of paused to stare at him in alarm. He waved them off and, up ahead, saw some people turning around away from the classroom door.

The _closed_ classroom door.

"Yo, what's going on?" a year-mate ahead of Clark called out; someone a greased back duck's ass hairstyle.

"Class is cancelled." one of the turn-arounds replied, with a resigned shrug.

"On the first day?!" was the general gist of the reaction from the rest of the stragglers.

_Wait, I rushed all the way here to not be late and class is __**cancelled**__?_ Clark thought incredulously, walking forward to see for himself. The sign taped to the door informed everyone that class was indeed cancelled today and that they should start reading the first three chapters in their textbook, very sorry.

"Damn, that wasn't on his page. I coulda slept in." Duck Butt Hair complained, clearly frustrated. "What kinda prof cancels on the first day and doesn't update?"

"He's the Weed Professor. People call 'im that cuz he like, broke his entire pelvis this one time so the doctor gets him the good stuff for the pain, so he's always kinda stoned." the other year-mate explained, shrugging some more. "I had 'im last year for this class on building a brand through social media. He told us 'bout it then."

"Must have been a bad morning." Clark commented.

"Yeah, musta." Other year-mate agreed. He shrugged one more time. "Comes and goes with him. Ah, well. Next week."

He walked away with a vague wave. Clark turned to leave too and had to pull up short. Duck Butt Hair had stepped up right behind him, grinning like he was about to make a new friend.

"Hey. It's Clark, right? I'm Marcus." he said, the handshake happening on automatic. "I was hoping I'd run into you today. Heard you walked away from a lunch date with the Mad Dog."

Clark blinked. "With the what?"

"Mad Dog. Y'know, Mad Dog Lane." Marcus elaborated, waving a hand.

For a moment, Clark was mystified. The only person he had really spoken to yesterday was Lois and-

Oh.

"Her first name is Lois." he said pointedly. "And that only happened _yesterday_, how does everyone _know_ already_-_-"

"It's Lane. Word gets around quick when it's her." Marcus said, waving his hand again, more dismissively and more firmly. "Listen, I'm with the newspaper club. We were chatting in group last night and we figured that anyone who walks away from her with their dick still intact has got balls of steel. And someone with balls of steel is exactly the kind of person we want."

He opened his wallet and handed Clark a business card. A real, actual business card with fancy gold-embossed letters and a silver satin finish.

"That's got all my contact info. You can get a direct link to the paper right off the school's website. You should check out our work, see if you're interested. We have got some great plans in the works and we would love to have you on board. I read that piece you submitted to the essay contest a while back, the whole thing about GMOs. Pretty stirring stuff."

"Oh, that. That's old." Clark said. Only by a year and a half, but he felt that he had improved significantly since then.

"Well, I was surprised it didn't place higher. It was good." Marcus said sincerely. "Anyways," He tapped the edge of the business card pointedly. "Newspaper club always need some new forward thinkers. I'd _love_ to see what you'd contribute. So think about it?"

"Oh yeah, of course, I'll- I'll think about it..."

"Cool. Also, gonna need a reply by the end of September. That's when recruitment closes. We can't take anyone on after September thirtieth."

"Right, right, I'll definitely get you an answer." Clark said assuredly, shuffling several steps away in an effort to close this conversation.

"First meetings next Thursday afternoon, if you wanna check us out." Marcus added, shuffling after him.

"I might have work that day."

"We can reschedule. Really, _really_ love to get you in on the ground floor. Newspaper club members usually get first pick at the internships. It's great if you're looking for opportunities."

"I'm really not. Not yet."

"Clark, that's no way to get ahead in the world_-_-"

"My parents told me not to go anywhere with pushy strangers."

Marcus stopped advancing abruptly, a look of consternation crossing his face, because wasn't _that_ a thing to hear from an adult. Clark took the opportunity to loudly declare "Okay bye thanks!" and power-walked back towards the stairs, leaving Marcus and his duck butt hair behind.

He considered the business card along the way, running a finger over the slightly raised letters. The offer to join the newspaper club had come up in the first year. He had declined, uncertain about his schedule and his time management skills coupled with living on his own for the first time. But this time? Maybe...

_Maybe_.

But he didn't know anyone in the newspaper club well enough to want to spend more time with them. If Marcus was just _one_ example of the sort of people that populated it, it would probably be less stressful to avoid the whole thing altogether.

Clark turned the business card over in his fingers several times, thinking. It seemed to rude to throw it away outright and it seemed even _ruder_ to try and hand it back. Finally, he placed it on top of the banister at the bottom of the stairs.

_You're not being social, son._ Chided a voice that always sounded like both of his parents put together.

No. No he wasn't.

Outside, he collected his bike and put some distance between himself and the Merton Building first (in case Marcus was feeling energized this morning), before he pulled off onto the side and considered his options for breakfast. That little shopping street off the campus had plenty of them, from all-day cafes, coffee shops, that crepe place, and assorted fast food joints. Whoever had written the top-rated reviews had given more focus to the coffee than the food, since obviously, if you were getting breakfast, the quality of your morning brew was at least the number two thing to consider.

Clark ended up going with the cheapest option on the street; a vividly orange fast food joint that looked like it was a ninety-degree angle away from a trademark law suit. The foodies didn't rate it _too_ poorly, though there was plenty of low-scored comments about the color scheme. Entering the place felt a lot like walking face-first into a furnace. There was so much _orange_. The walls, squares of tile on the floor, the lampshades, the bench seats, etcetera. Where it wasn't white or off-white or poster-sized advertisements, it was either orange or a somewhat darker shade of orange. So he _almost_ didn't see the staff member behind the counter at the first register, since they also wore a searing orange shirt and a matching visor, and blended in unusually well with the tiled wall behind them-

Clark did a double-take.

"Lois?"

"Oh. Hey Smallville." Lois replied in this unimpressed sort of way, wearing a delighted smirk.

Clark had to look away and then look back, just to make sure his visual cortex wasn't being thrown off by the egregious color scheme that was being stabbed mercilessly into his eyeballs. When he looked back, it was still Lois behind the counter, albeit clashing with the background so badly it looked like she'd been photoshopped in.

"Lois, you_-_-" Look terrible in orange, Clark did not say. He wrestled those words back and finished with: "Work here."

"Gal's gotta be able to buy her own groceries." Lois quipped. Then she cleared her throat, banished the smirk from her face and recited dully: "Welcome to Happy Burger Smile, home of the five-patty stack. We've always got a happy smile for you."

Clark winced. "You say that every time?"

"Sometimes I say it in my sleep." Lois said flatly. Then her expression brightened, the smirk resuming its place. "What'll it be?"

"Er, are you still serving breakfast?"

"Yep. 'Til ten-thirty."

"Okay..." Clark peered at the menu board. "A number two?"

"Good choice. The imitation sausage actually tastes like it could be the real thing." Lois said. "You want fries with that?" She grinned like she hadn't been able to resist. "No one ever gives me the opening anymore. But seriously, you want fries or hash browns?"

"Onion rings?"

"A man of excellent taste." Lois commented. "Coffee or no? Foodies rate it being pretty good. I've never had it, though. I like to know where my beans come from. I mean, I try not to eat here very often if I can help it."

"No, no coffee. I think I'll be unhealthy and take a soda."

"Yolo." She totaled up the order. "Heading to class after?"

Clark shook his head. "No, it was cancelled."

"On the first full week? Who have you got?" Lois asked, gesturing him to the card reader in front of the register.

"The Weed Professor."

"Oh, that makes sense. Probably overdid it at the skate park. I heard something about him breaking a hip a few years ago."

"One of my classmates said it was his entire pelvis."

"Well, he did some damage to it, whatever bone it was." Lois slid a tall paper cup at him. "So, if you're planning not to run away too quickly, I'm off in about fifteen minutes." she added in a somewhat lower voice, like she was trying not to be overheard in the kitchen.

Clark nearly dropped his card when he pulled it from the reader.

Wait.

Wait, wait, wait.

Were two incomprehensible cosmic forces fighting each other over whether or not Clark Kent and Lois Lane should become more than just passingly acquainted individuals? Had one cosmic force arranged for him to oversleep so there was no way he could possibly be tempted to stop in for breakfast on the way? Had the other arranged for the professor to cancel the class so he _would_ go for breakfast at this particular fast food joint? Was he about to have _another_ meal in the company of Lois Lane in the span of just less than twenty-four hours?

Was this the universe firing a warning shot across the bow?

"It's nice outside." Clark said.

Lois grinned. "I'll see you outside, then."

She waved him aside to make space for the next customer. Clark grabbed the tall paper cup and shuffled off to the drink station. It seemed this was actually going to happen. Another meal_-_\- Another breakfast type meal in Lois's company, at just about the same hour of the day too.

Weird. He had gone two years without ever crossing paths with Lois once, but _now_ he was spending out-of-class time with her twice in the same span of twenty-four hours. With plans to meet up on Thursday night (and probably get into some serious trouble).

The universe was plotting something. The universe was _definitely_ plotting something.

In short order, Clark's meal was delivered across the counter and he took it outside to the dining area there. He absolutely was not going to sit in this chromatic hellscape if he didn't have to. He fetched his bike from the rack so he could keep an eye on it more directly and then sat down to his breakfast.

It looked sad and yet, weirdly appetizing.

And the imitation sausage _did_ almost taste like the real thing.

Not quite fifteen minutes after Clark had sat down, Lois joined him, sliding a tray of her own along the table top. She had taken the first opportunity to banish the orange shirt and had replaced it with a dark blue one. The visor had similarly vanished as well, likely stuffed into the bottom of the bag she had stowed between her feet.

For a moment, the pair of them sat awkwardly and silently across from each other.

"Don't tell anyone I work here." Lois said suddenly, breaking the silence.

Clark jumped. "Why_-_\- Why would I tell anyone?"

"Good question. But where I work is supposedly a big mystery to everyone and I want to keep it that way. I don't want to get harassed by idiots." Lois said. "I don't want to have to quit. This job gives me vision and dental."

"You get vision _and_ dental? That's not fair; my job doesn't even give me bike insurance. I have to pay for that." Clark complained. At Lois's raised eyebrow, he added: "Dash N Dine Delivery."

She went "hrrgh" like physical pain had accompanied the brand-name. "Well, that four-to-midnight schedule makes sense. I hear the pay is garbage."

"It is. It's _garbage_. At least people don't mark down tips anymore, so I get to keep it all. And since I'm outside pretty much the entire time, I don't have to put up with any annoying co-workers. It's just my manager doesn't seem to care whether we live or die as long as the delivery gets there on time."

Lois started laughing. It wasn't funny, really, being expected _-_\- encouraged even, to put your job above your life and health. But was a problem that was generally shared among employees of the service industry and they all could sympathize, so it was _darkly_ funny.

And it was a very nice laugh with no obvious hints of sarcasm.

_She has a nice smile and a nice laugh when it isn't sarcastic how come everyone wants to focus on the bad things?_ Clark wondered, trying hard not to stare.

Lois stopped laughing just as quickly as she had started and stared at the table in a vaguely shell-shocked kind of way. "We both need better jobs." she said.

"I'm worried if I quit, I won't be able to find another one."

"Yeah, that part sucks."

Happy Burger Smile had gotten the coveted corner spot at the end of the shopping plaza road, so the patio overlooked more retail outlets across the wide intersection. The cars idling noisily at the intersection beside them kept the ensuing silence from getting _too_ weird.

"I figured it out." Lois said, breaking the silence again first. "Where I saw you before. We sat next to each other during freshman orientation."

Clark blinked. "Oh, we did?" He couldn't recall the gender who had been sitting on either side of him, much less anything specific about their appearances. All he remembered was being jittery and experiencing the worst 'fish out of water' sensation ever.

"Yeah. I remembered at like, three in the morning last night." Lois added, tearing off a piece of largely unadorned burger. "Jawline like a diamond-cutter and glasses like coke bottles. Those new ones look better. You sounded like an extra who ran off the set of some gosh golly jeepers old timey Old West production. Thickest Southern accent I'd ever heard in my life."

"I've heard thicker." Clark commented. "Some of the older folks in Smallville have accents so thick you practically need a professor of dead languages to work it out. Chikashshanompa in a southern accent is incomprehensible, you have _no idea_..."

"Chika what now?"

"The Chickasaw language."

Lois's eyebrows crept of her forehead. "You can speak some of that?"

Clark shrugged. "Sort of? I couldn't take the class officially because there was no room left, but the teacher did some after-school tutoring. I don't think I got very good at it _-_\- I mean, there's not a whole lot of chance for exposure _-_\- but I did okay enough to parse out sentences."

Lois tore off another piece of burger, the yellow cheese stretching briefly, and shoved it in her mouth like it was the only thing preventing her from sticking her foot in there as well. For the amount of time it took her to chew and swallow and then wash it down with some soda, she stared intensely at Clark like she was trying mentally to strip back the layers and peer directly at his brain.

"Okay, what kind of town _is_ Smallville? I keep picturing this cute little Norman Rockwell meets Thomas Kinkade nineteen-fifties kind of wholesome places, but then you mention _meteor showers_ and learning _Chickasaw_ and your horny town founder which are just _not_ things that a person normally associates with cute little Norman Rockwell meets Thomas Kinkade nineteen-fifties kind of wholesome places_-_\- Actually, no. That last one I can believe, the horny town founder. I can believe that. I just can't get my head around the rest of it."

"Smallville's a normal small town, Lois. I promise."

"Well then, tell me something normal about it."

Clark thought for a moment. "Well, there's a statue of Ezra Small."

"Is it a nice statue?"

"It's very, um, _virile_."

Lois blinked. Waited a moment to see if Clark would use a different word. He didn't.

"Virile." she repeated.

"Mm, the sculptor wanted to commemorate Ezra's best qualities, so I guess that included his only stand-out physical quality. He wasn't all that attractive."

"Stand out... As in?..."

"As in, the aforementioned physical quality is _very_ visible. My parents avoided walking in front of that statue for years. They laughed about it when they thought I couldn't hear, though."

"He must have had an enormous schwanzstucker."

"We used to shoot spitballs at it. There was this story that went if you wrote your name on a scrap of paper and got it right on the, uh, the upper bit, Ezra would show up in your bedroom at midnight _ready to go_, if you know what I mean."

"Country kids have to make do." Lois giggled. "Do you ever try it?"

Clark went "ehhhh" in a very noncommittal kind of way and there was a vague pink color in his cheeks.

"You tried it?" Lois laughed a little more loudly this time.

"I was fifteen, it was one those things everyone tried." Clark said, both self-consciously and defensively. "And no, the town founder did not manifest physically in my bedroom."

"Shame. If he managed to foster two percent of the present day population, he must have had some mad game." Lois commented, nodding to herself. "Any other sort of small town shenanigans from your misspent youth?"

"My youth was not misspent." Clark said. "Just the usual stuff, I guess. You know, like weed and car-surfing and we _may_ or _may not have_ set up an illegal still in the old orchard. I am not at liberty to confirm that."

"That sounds pretty misspent." Lois pointed out. Then she frowned. "Car surfing?"

Clark shrugged. "A bunch of us would get together, get drunk, and go driving on the dirt roads and the driver would fish-tail around while the rest of us would try to hang on on top." he said. And when it was said out loud, he realized just how _utterly dangerous_ it sounded. How had his very normal teenage human classmates lived to see graduation?

"Illegal still in the orchard?" Lois questioned with a knowing quirk in her smile.

"Yeah, the only place to buy alcohol was the general store and Mr. Fordman knew exactly how old all of us were and it was all behind the counter, and we could never really justify to our parents a reason to drive all the way into Edge City, so we made our own. The orchard itself was shut down but all the trees were still there. It was kind of this apple scumble. We got pretty good at it." Clark admitted. A handful of teens and all the knowledge of high school chemistry they could muster.

Something about the apple scumble got Clark very, very drunk. The apple scumble also got his (biological) grandfather very, very drunk. But nothing else did, so it was definitely something about the soil composition of the orchard that had leaked into the trees and then the apples in turn. However, his grandfather did not have the necessary scientific background to figure out the specifics.

"You never got caught with the under-age still?"

"Oh no, we definitely got caught a few times. We just hid it better the next time."

Lois laughed again and startled herself with how _easy_ the sound came out. For a second, she thought _Too easy_ very suspiciously. Things that were too easy were generally worthy of suspicion. She didn't laugh easily around guys she had known less than a day_-_-

_Don't ruin the moment!_ She thought fiercely, mentally shaking away the notions. _This is a very nice moment of platonic human interaction. Be chill._

It was just _too soon_ to get herself all worked up over how easy and effortless it was to talk to him, before she had felt him out properly. He did seem like a genuinely nice guy, however. While Lois hadn't had _high_ expectations for the likes of Mr. Kent, she'd also been careful not to cultivate any low expectations. Although honestly, she could set the bar at its lowest possible point and a man would still yell _"Hold my beer!" _and grab a shovel to start digging.

At the least, Clark wasn't trying to limbo under the bar.

_Anyways, keep the conversation going. There's still Thursday._ Lois thought to herself. "So what else can you tell me?"

"About...?"

Lois shrugged. "Whatever comes to mind. Parents, friends, siblings, family, pets, past relationships, etcetera. All that basic getting to know you stuff. Uh, don't expect me to reciprocate. The military thing turned my dad into a hard-ass, so uh... We don't get along very well." she admitted, though it sounded like it had taken some effort to wrench the words out of her mouth.

"Okay..." Clark decided to stay well away from that one. "I don't have any siblings. I'm adopted, but my maternal grandfather lives nearby. Uh, I live on a farm, actually, so we've had a lot of dogs for herding and stuff. I guess Krypto is mine specifically. He's _huge_, like up to my ribs tall. We had to guess at his breed, but he's definitely a wolf-hybrid. Lots of training, but he's a great herder and livestock guard dog. Haven't seen a coyote around the farm in years. Uh, my friend Pete wants to run for councilman in Edge City and Lana is in Paris studying fashion. And I didn't actually date in high school."

"I don't believe that for a second. Handsome man like you never went on dates in between car surfing and apple orchard ragers?" Lois snorted.

Clark blushed. "You think I'm handsome?" His voice squeaked like it was breaking all over again. He had to clear his throat like it was the only way to get rid of the embarrassment and the weirdly pleased feeling he had from Lois's comment. It wasn't that he had never considered himself attractive, but he had never flaunted it like bright plumage. It just wasn't a thing he did.

It was nice, though, to hear someone tell him that he was, in fact, handsome.

"Er, no. I didn't date. I mean, we all knew each other since kindergarten and I guess it was a little awkward to date someone you knew used to eat crayons or stuck glue in their hair because they wanted a mohawk." he added.

Lois snorted a giggle, her gaze flitting up to his hair like she was imagining him with the glue stick mohawk. "Slim pickings in the middle of nowhere." she commented. "Must have been a culture shock to come here and leave behind all that flat land."

"It's not actually _flat_ out there." Clark said. "Smallville's in the southwest corner and Colorado is also about two hours away so it starts getting hillier the further west you go. And it's not _really_ the middle of nowhere either. The Santa Fe Trail wasn't too far off and the Elbow River is a tributary of the Cimarron which empties into the Arkansas. According to Ezra Small's personal accounting, he didn't like the idea of crossing the mountains _-_\- they were headed for California _-_\- and decided that he was staying right there and everyone else just sort of agreed with him. They went south to avoid crossing the Missouri River and went too far so they were sandwiched between the Arkansas and the Cimarron, so there wasn't any good way to get around the Elbow River and I guess everyone else just considered trying to make the crossing an unnecessary risk. The wagon leaders were pretty gung-ho about fording the river, but Ezra basically told them to fuck off and suck his dick. I think he was using some eighteen-thirties slang. The ladies running the historical society kept trying to tell me that he wasn't talking about his penis, but the sentence was clearly referencing dick-based sodomization."

"Your town founder sounds like someone I would have liked to meet." Lois said, almost thoughtfully.

"He was _colorful_." Clark said. "I got a lot of extra credit on my project for including some of the lesser-known details. Like, he was actually a cobbler and I think he had some background in general repair-work. I think that was the only reason the wagon train leaders let him come along. According to the other journals, he was just really irritable all the time, but he also had a useful skill. The historical society really tries to paint him as having been someone important, but he wasn't. He was just the cobbler. I had to break into the museum after dark to get the entries they wouldn't let me see."

Lois blinked. "You had to do _what_?"

Clark squirmed a little. "Mrs. Phillips wouldn't let me read a few of the journal entries and the copies she _did_ give me were edited so I... broke into the museum through one of the basement windows and downloaded the files off her computer."

He wasn't totally proud of that, but Mrs. Phillips shouldn't have shorted him on the information in the first place.

Lois looked him over with an appraising expression, like she was re-evaluating her opinion of him. Dare he say there was a touch of approval in those purple-ish blue eyes?

"Did you delete them? The files?"

"No, I kept them and forwarded copies to all of my classmates later. I was trying to force Mrs. Phillips into acknowledging her bias."

Lois nodded in clear approval now. "You know, Clark. I'm starting to think you've got an enormous schwanzstucker of your own. What did your parents think?" she asked. "Or was that another case like the illegal beer still?"

"Oh. No, they found out. Mrs. Phillips told them." Clark said, smiling at the memory. "She just couldn't _prove_ it was me; I used a throwaway email and I put all the files on a thumb-drive so they weren't on my computer. My parents grounded me only for show. I was usually the good one, so that helped."

"Wait... You broke into a museum for a school project, participated in the brewing and drinking of apple liquor, and went drunk car-surfing on the regular, and you were the _good one_?" Lois asked incredulously.

"...Yes?"

It was just that, it wasn't easy for Clark to get drunk (unless it was the aforementioned apple scumble, then he was three sheets to the wind) and he was very durable. Theoretically, he was bullet-proof (but he wasn't about to test that), so falling off the car had never hurt him much. His parents were more than just passingly acquainted with the whitewash that was history. And _-_\- if this was honesty hour _-_\- it had been his pa who'd told him how to jiggle open that basement window.

Across from him, Lois had started smiling, albeit in a decidedly different tone than previously. Clark wasn't sure if it was smug, delighted, satisfied, or all three at once. She nodded vigorously, pointing back and forth between them and looking like all of her dreams had come true.

"You and me, Smallville. You and me." she said, delighted. "You and me, we're gonna be just fine. We are going to get along _great_."

That sounded ominous.

_I think I've started something I can't take back._ Clark thought, chills going down his spine. He was stuck with Lois Lane, infamous campus cryptid and all-around madwoman, for the foreseeable future. And she had decided that he was a good guy. Being Lois's bad side was reportedly unpleasant, but being on her good side? Well, no one had ever been there before, so Clark was in uncharted territory. Did that mean he was going to get hauled along on every mostly dangerous endeavor she could think of?

"So, uh... If we're sharing..." Clark started, a little nervously. "I've heard like, four or five arson stories about you. I was just..."

"Wondering which ones are true?" Lois finished, with a bit of a smirk. "Well, the Wallace Luthor tree happened. I was protesting."

"By burning down a tree?"

"It needed to be a visible statement. The Luthors are full of shit. Besides, it was infested with emerald ash borers. It was dying anyways." she added, like that justified it. "And the one with Professor Crawford, that happened too."

"You actually set his car on fire." Clark said flatly.

"First, he was a pervert who got horny over _children_, okay? Second, I was not originally planning to do that." Lois started in a very reasonable tone while not making eye contact. "I was just going to loosen the battery clamps a bit so the car wouldn't start so the police would catch him at home after the anonymous tip about his kiddie porn stash, but I think there was a bomb wired to the alternator." she explained, her voice dropping with every word until it was a whisper.

"You_-_\- You blew up his car?" Clark asked incredulously, because _that_ part wasn't in the story.

"I just wanted him in jail, not dead. So I delayed the fuse and tripped it and hit the deck. It got the job done either way." Lois looked a touch ashamed of this, covering her cheeks with both hands. "The rumor mill really downplayed that one."

"You blew up _a car_."

"Seeing that I prevented an unnecessary tragedy _and_ Professor Crawford got convicted, I think it cancels out."

Clark thought about that one for a moment. Sure, blowing up a car was not a good way to get things done _-_\- bombs were never a solution to a problem _-_\- but Professor Crawford had indeed been convicted and right now was probably sharing a wing (if not a cell) with Stryker's serial rapists. One less pervert to traumatize small children.

"I guess." he conceded. He blinked. "I just realized I don't have your phone number."

Lois choked and visibly spewed a mouthful of drink back into her cup.

"Not like that!" Clark corrected hastily, his cheeks flushing. "Not like that, that's not what I meant! Just in case an emergency pops up before Thursday! We should be able to get a hold of each other! _That's_ what I meant! Not_-_\- Not anything else!"

"_Jeezus_," Lois thumped her chest, coughing once to clear her throat. "Don't spring that on a girl."

"Sorry."

"No, I know what you mean, just don't _say_ it like that. Phone. Gimme."

"I can do_-_-"

"Phone. Gimme, gimme."

Lois made a grabby hand at him and, seeing that she would probably not be deterred, Clark unlocked the home screen and turned his phone over.

"Ooh, a Pearl. You know, WayneTech makes the _best_ smartphones. These suckers can survive a six-floor drop." Lois commented, holding her phone side by side with his and displaying excellent ambidexterity with her thumbs.

"My parents really like that they don't listen in one your conversations." Clark commented, absently noticing that her phone case had the stylized eagle-like W representing Wonder Woman. "They made sure. Talked about buying seeds and didn't get any targeted ads at all."

"I think LexCorp is getting sued over something like that." Lois said, most of her attention on the phones. "Emotional distress over targeted ads or something. They'll only settle because Luthor won't let any bad publicity get up to his level. Okay, done."

Clark glanced at the new contact and slid the phone back into his pocket. "Okay, I think it's your turn." he said, picking up his breakfast sandwich.

"My turn for what?"

"Tell me something neat about Metropolis."

Lois's intrigued expression turned into a sharp, smirky grin.

-0-

The trouble I ran into with the first version of this story was the pacing. The pacing was absolutely blistering and it was starting to feel like I was squeezing out character development and worldbuilding for action. So, Clark and Lois get another chapter to get to know each other before I yeet them off the deep end.

I don't believe in filler chapters.


End file.
